Naked Cruelty

by Colleen McCullough

  They had emerged from the streets and functioning factories into a relatively vast area that had been demolished in the aftermath of the Second World War with the intention of building a prison. Beyond it sat Holloman Jail, which was a jail, not a prison. Short-term, that is, lacking the architecture and facilities necessary for the high security confinement of intractable criminals. These were sent up-state, but from time to time new noises were made in Hartford to go ahead with Holloman Prison, an institution no resident of Holloman wanted. Bad enough to have a jail!

  The area did not resemble a war zone, unless that war be an atomic one; there were no shells of buildings, just gigantic heaps of stony detritus that rose and fell like the foothills of a red rectangular mountain range, the jail.

  “We need a minidozer with a blade,” Liam said. “A bucket as well, but not attached. If there’s anything under the edge of one of these piles, we’d never find it unless we have something to move the crap around, but a bulldozer might be too heavy.”

  “Good idea,” said Abe, who was feeling a little dizzy. “I’ll radio the Captain, see if he can arrange a miniature dozer.”

  Tony Cerutti produced a set of blueprints from the back seat of their car. “These are the plans of the mooted prison as they saw it in 1948,” he said, spreading the huge sheets on the hood and anchoring them with hunks of old brick.

  “Did they actually get as far as starting to build?” Abe asked, staring fascinated at several pentagons connected by thick passageways. “Make a good Meccano project.” His sons were avidly into Meccano, and buying it was keeping him poor.

  Came a squawk from the radio. When Abe returned to the plans he looked content. “We’ll have a little dozer here in about an hour, blade attached, bucket in reserve, backhoe just in case. In the meantime, guys, we walk. Liam, you go toward the east end of the jail. Tony, take the middle. I’m going west.”

  Tony laughed. “Yeah, a long time ago!”

  Liam and Tony set off; still conscious of an alien dizziness, Abe lingered to take another look at the plans of the west side. He didn’t know why he felt so strange, except that in some way it was important. Then the headache hit, and Abe fell to his knees.

  Two walls were full, Kurt had moved on to his third wall; he had sharpened ten of his pencils down to stumps, but the last five were the longest and best, deliberately saved. His mouth was utterly dry and his ears rang on an internal sound, but the excitement of putting his life’s work on his tomb walls had not faded. Egyptian pharaohs were reduced to pictures of their lazy existence, interspersed with an occasional battle, but not one of them could equal his feat! Not one of them could display a life so filled with intellectual incident and triumph.

  The bucket his captors had left him for his bodily functions had not filled, but it stank. Though the room was cold, Kurt had sacrificed his coat to throw over it, blanket the stench. They said a human being got used to smells, but so far he hadn’t. At least the chill meant that he lost no moisture through sweat, but Kurt was conscious that it was becoming difficult to stand. His back ached intolerably and he was forced to lie down at increasingly frequent intervals, but the work went on.

  Time for a break; he sat gazing around the closely written walls, the smile on his lips spontaneous. Thank God for work! What if he hadn’t owned the mentality or the professional training to occupy himself through what he was sure had mounted into days? How would someone who processed copies of the same form for a living manage to survive this imprisonment ending in death without going mad? He believed devoutly in a properly Catholic God, but few people had the kind of mind that could dwell upon God day in and day out, especially with death as its conclusion. That seemed a contradiction, but no man was ever ready for death unless he were a saint, and Kurt knew he was no saint; modern men could never be saints because modern living negated the concept.

  But I, thought Kurt, head spinning, have never harmed the world, even by my nuclear research. The damage is done … He lay flat out, his head too heavy to keep aloft, a mist swirling before his eyes. Slowly they closed; he slept, woke with a jerk, saw the third wall almost pristine, got to his feet and picked up the equations where he had left them. His body was failing, yes, but his mind was still capable of seeing mathematical truth.

  I wish, he thought, pausing, that I could hear some Bach one last time!

  The headache disappeared as suddenly as it had come. The plans, the plans, Abe thought in a quiet frenzy. A number of straight, parallel lines traveled from the prison itself toward a square that said in tiny print that it was a sewage holding tank. Much larger than a septic tank, this thing was the size of a Holloman PD drunks’ tank cell.

  Suddenly Abe stiffened. His skin began to prickle in a way it never had, and he understood. This is the first time I’ve looked for a living, fully grown man! The life in him is big enough to affect me! I am staring at a prison—a real prison! They built this holding tank, they probably put in some of the inlets, the outlet, the vent—it’s there, under a thin layer of rubble. He’s there! Kurt von Fahlendorf is there!

  Abe had a whistle on a cord around his neck; he put it to his lips and blew a shrill blast. Liam and Tony came at a run, while a guard toting a rifle on his back leaned on the railing of a watchtower atop the jail wall and followed their antics.

  “We have to find the sewage holding tank,” Abe said, “and I’m not waiting for machinery. But first we find the gravel—the tank won’t be far from the pink gravel.”

  A more confused directive than they were used to from Abe, but neither Liam nor Tony misunderstood. All three men went in different westerly directions.

  “Here!” Tony shouted, appearing around a huge hillock.

  And there it was, an expanse of pink rubble about a hundred feet long and fifty feet wide. Beyond it lay more flat ground, but smothered in ragged pieces of concrete.

  “They stopped on the pink because this concrete’s sharper,” Liam said. “What happens now, Abe?”

  “We look for pipes or vents,” Abe said, the master at this kind of work. “Watch around your feet, you won’t see anything from a distance. My vibes say von Fahlendorf is alive, which means the vent is open and you’ll see it. You remember that rain storm we had last Monday and cursed? Well, it might have shifted things hereabouts, so look. Look!”

  Abe found it, a round four-inch hole that originally had been covered by a concrete slab that had slipped off it in the brief but torrential rain; the signs were unmistakable, for whoever had put the little slab in place was no construction worker. It had probably never done its intended job, to block the ingress of air.

  “A gap is all that’s needed,” Abe said, that terrible daze vanishing just as the headache had.

  The little bulldozer arrived, but by then Tony had raced to the jail and phoned in their find to Carmine; soon the wasteland in front of the jail was crawling with cops and machinery.

  “He’s alive!” came Patrick O’Donnell’s voice from below.

  A cheer went up, men hugged each other.

  “Carmine, you have to see what’s down there,” said Liam in an awed voice, emerging.

  Carmine squeezed through the trapdoor in the holding tank roof and climbed down the few steps of a ladder to join a jubilant Abe. Cameras were flashing constantly.

  “Holy shits!” Carmine whispered, staring at the many hundreds of penciled equations. “What the hell is it?”

  “The unified field theory, for all I know,” said Abe. “The work, Carmine, the work! Von Fahlendorf can’t have the original, but he’ll have to have photographic copies. What a feat!”

  “How many Masses have you committed me to, John?” Carmine asked the Commissioner an hour later in his office.

  “Fifteen, the old-fashioned way.”

  “I’ll wear my knees out!”

  “So will I. So will Mrs. Tesoriero, God bless her. She’s been praying night and d
ay. When I commit you to Masses the old-fashioned way, Carmine, the cause is very urgent. But you and Mrs. Tesoriero always come through. Miraculous!”

  “It’s Abe Goldberg comes through, and he’s Jewish.”

  “That guy is spooky, I admit. How does he do it?”

  “He doesn’t know. He says he gets a feeling, but not always.”

  “A pity cops can’t claim rewards. Without Abe Goldberg, von Fahlendorf would be dead and ten million bucks would have wound up in a Swiss bank account.” Silvestri assumed his cat-got-the-cream expression. “I did explain to Frau von Fahlendorf that she could show her deep appreciation for the excellent work of Lieutenant Goldberg by setting up a college fund for Abe’s sons. Really bright boys, from what I hear.”

  “I forgive you, and I’ll do the Masses the old-fashioned way, down on my knees instead of a donation.”

  “That means all three of us will be in St. Bernard’s for the next fifteen mornings. Oh, my arthur-itis!”

  “We’ll never nail his kidnappers,” Carmine said.

  “I know. Tell me why it’s a German operation.”

  Carmine leaned forward, hands clasped between his knees. “Too unnecessarily complicated, John. Like a German motor—over-engineered. Americans would have used a car trunk, whereas these bozos went to the trouble of finding that sewage holding tank. Who got the prison plans from County Services? Why stand out in the open with surveyor’s gear to pinpoint its location? The way they see the world tells them that complicated is better. The risk taking isn’t seen as risk taking, but as normal activities. They’re too obsessive to be American kidnappers. Simple is better.”

  “I do see what you mean.” Silvestri sighed. “In which case, we haven’t the hope of a snowflake in hell of nailing them.”

  “The important thing is that we got von Fahlendorf back in one piece, and the ransom wasn’t paid. So now I’m free to ask questions and expect answers.”

  “A minute ago you were the soul of pessimism, Carmine. What’s changed inside that minute?”

  “I’ve just realized that I have a weapon, John. The adorable Helen MacIntosh—or, at least, Kurt thinks she’s adorable. I happen to know that she has an income of a million dollars a year, so a trip to Munich isn’t going to bust her bank. Kurt has ideas of marrying her. What if I could persuade Helen to talk Kurt into making a visit home with his fiancée on his arm?”

  “You devious schemer!”

  “She wouldn’t like committing herself maritally to Kurt, but she’d wear it for two reasons. The first, she’s quite cold-hearted in a MacIntosh way, so it won’t grieve her overmuch to break the engagement on her return from Munich, and the second, that she’s panting to run her own case. If she has three or four days in Munich, she has a chance to find Kurt’s kidnappers. In fact, if she takes Kurt into her confidence, she needn’t promise to marry him in reality. He’s livid enough to co-operate.”

  “You get more devious by the second!”

  “I do, don’t I? Well, think about it, John. Two shits we don’t know had us running in circles and spending a lot of money we’ll never see again. The von Fahlendorfs will keep their ten million, but the several million finding Kurt cost us—goodbye!”

  “Do it, Carmine, do it.”

  “Will you be in it, Helen?” Carmine asked his trainee the next morning. “I know you’d have to fund your trip yourself, but would you consider the expense worth it if you could find the kidnappers?”

  Her eyes were shining. “Captain Delmonico, I’d walk up the Spanish Steps on my knees to get iron-clad evidence on Kurt’s kidnappers! And he’ll co-operate, I know he will. He was a little disappointed when no member of his family was there to see him come out of his cell, but Dagmar managed to sweet-talk him around. In fact, she seems to have sweet-talked him so efficiently that he’s already muttering about taking a trip home to check up on the folks.”

  “Then you have a case, Helen, that entirely depends on you for a solution. If you can’t crack it, no one can.” Carmine nodded at a chair. “Sit down, sit down! It’s going to take some time to organize. In the meantime, what have you deduced?”

  “They did their homework, sir, that’s foremost. They must have known that green card holders have fingerprints on record in Washington, D.C. They knew enough to get the prison plans from County Services archives. They knew how much money was going to be freed up as a trust for the grandchildren, and the date it was happening. They knew enough to allow a week for the gathering of the ransom, for no other reason, I believe, than that they assumed people like the FBI would expect a week for such a huge ransom. In actual fact, they could have made their time span an hour. But that would have pointed toward Germany and away from America. A lot of their information about how things are done here came from movies and television.” Her brow creased. “However, there are anomalies, sir. The air vent wasn’t closed firmly enough to survive a downpour, which says the villains are not familiar with downpours. Or it may be saying that one of the two didn’t really want to see Kurt die. He was left water that would have lasted longer if he hadn’t guzzled some and spilled some. Was it a form of torture or a hope that Kurt would be found before he died? One of the two is a real hater, Captain, but the other is a weakling. And which one left a bucket? You don’t leave a bucket for someone you expect to die, though I don’t think the bucket had anything to do with Kurt’s living or dying. I believe that whoever left it knows Kurt personally, and didn’t want him to endure the indignity of looking at his own excrement. If there is a personal link, then both kidnappers know Kurt. The weakling is under the domination of the hater, but doesn’t like how he or she feels. It may be that cutting Kurt’s finger off tipped the balance, hence the water and the bucket. The hater can’t have realized their significance, or maybe the weakling threw a tantrum, as weaklings can.” She stopped. “How did I do?”

  “Very well, but I’m a pussycat,” said Carmine with a grin. “It’s Kurt you have to fool, Helen.”

  “When do you think we should go?”

  Carmine frowned. “Today is the twenty-fourth, and the Dodo is due to attack Tuesday or Wednesday of election week. Provided he’s on schedule, you have time to go before, though I’m not sure what his schedule is going to be now he’s killing.”

  “Yes, if it’s two weeks, he’s due next week,” Helen said. “If we go tomorrow, Friday, we can be back by Monday night.”

  “Passport? What if you need a visa?”

  “Sometimes it’s handy to be my father’s daughter. I can get whatever I need, and Kurt’s all set up.”

  “That doesn’t leave you much time for investigations at this end, Helen.”

  “I have this afternoon. It’s enough.”

  “You realize you’re off the Dodo until I can close the kidnappers, even if the kidnappers are never arraigned?”

  “Yes, Captain.”

  “Then I won’t delay you any further.”

  The Captain’s departure left Helen pondering her logistics; this afternoon she had to buy two airline tickets to Munich, and that meant Lufthansa, not TWA; then she had to find out how the kidnappers got hold of the Holloman prison plans. She saw her way about the travel almost immediately, and picked up the phone to dial a number she knew better than her own—her father’s. But not to speak to him. She wanted his secretary. Ten minutes of cajoling later, and it would all be done for her, though she still had one thing to do on that front; she called Tiffany’s and had them send the dear woman a pair of ruby earrings.

  Next, a call to Kurt, home from the hospital.

  “Darling,” she cooed, “how about I bring over Chinese tonight and we have a quiet evening?”

  “Helen, yes, please!”

  “Six o’ clock, with a bottle of Moët?”

  “Yes, please!”

  Good, that was organized. Slinging her bag over her shoulder, Helen set out for a dif
ferent part of the County Services building to find out who had obtained a copy of the prison plans.

  After drawing a blank at three of the five sections holding those plans, she hit paydirt at Correctional Institutions, the new euphemism for places where people were incarcerated apart from society in general. It included juvenile detention centers and the parole system, but it also housed penal archives.

  A middle-aged clerk manned the enquiry counter, a mournful fellow who, thought Helen, would remember nothing of the people fronting up to his desk. But when he beheld this beautiful young woman in her immaculate, tasteful clothes, every memory cell in his brain opened in a flood of information. Shabby lawyers and desperate parents did nothing for him, but a girl with stunning apricot hair that never came out of a dye bottle—!

  “The lady who asked for blueprints of the prison plans? Oh, yes, I remember her, officer. Who couldn’t?”

  “What made her memorable, apart from asking for those particular blueprints?” Helen asked, smiling seductively.

  “Well, she was such a lady. Beautiful clothes in a maroon shade that suited her. She even wore a hat and gloves, both in the same shade of maroon. The gloves were finest French kid, and the hat screamed Paris. Not vulgar clothes, like modern trash,” the clerk said, warming to his theme. “Her suit looked like Chanel or Balenciaga, and her shoes were Charles Jourdan.”

  “You’re amazingly conversant with women’s fashions, sir.”

  He simpered. “My wife is a keen follower of fashion, Miss. She and I design clothes as a recreation.”

  “I wish more of our witnesses did! What was her face like?”

  “Hard to see—her hat had a maroon net veil that covered the top half of her face, and it had little furry bobbles on it. Stylish!”he exclaimed, sighing. “Her lipstick was maroon and didn’t really follow the outline of her lips—she preferred being in fashion to anatomical accuracy, I guess. Her hair was a light brown and beautifully cared for.”