Naked Cruelty

by Colleen McCullough

“Did she have an accent?”

  “Yes. Foreign, more northern European than southern.”

  “Like German?”

  “Exactly!”

  “Would you know her again, sir?”

  “By her clothes, anyone would.”

  “Who is the best-dressed woman in the world?”

  He looked amazed at Helen’s ignorance. “The Duchess of Windsor, even if she is getting old.”

  “What about Audrey Hepburn?”

  “Can’t hold a candle to Her Highness,” he said fervently.

  Hmm, thought Helen, leaving Correctional Institutions. So a very haute couture woman collected the plans! A German accent, as we suspected. No real description of her face. We have two kinds of cases on our files at the moment. One is prompted by sex, and the other by greed. So far greed hasn’t led to murder, since Kurt survived, but why do I think it will? I mustn’t forget the glass teddy bear, a reason for greed too. And nothing is what it seems! The German woman isn’t poor—that funny little guy knew enough about fashions to put what she was wearing at about five thousand dollars. Per annum a Chubb technician lives on that.

  She still had some time, and two Holloman watchtower guards had information to offer.

  “A man and a woman appeared several weeks ago with surveyor’s gear and measured up the vacant ground outside,” said the first guard. “They concentrated on the gravel area and the ground beyond it. Must have been there most of a day.”

  “Can you remember the date?”

  “The week of September 16 to 20.”

  “Did you put the glasses on them?”

  “No need for the binocs, officer. They were two surveyors in coveralls with city lettering on the back. One was a man and one was a woman. Women do all kinds of jobs these days.”

  “I saw one of them baby bulldozers pushing rubble around,” said the second guard. “The date was September 30—I know because it was the last day of the month and it fell on a Monday. My wife works at Chubb, only gets paid twelve times a year, on the last day of the month. Lousy system!”

  “Yes, Chubb workers do it hard on long months. What do you think the baby bulldozer was doing?”

  The guard shrugged. “We figured they were going to start building the prison, except no one heard nothing on the grapevine. And after that one day, no one never came back.”

  So, said Helen to herself as she unearthed her latest notebook, I now know that the kidnappers went to considerable pains to locate a cell for Kurt, and that they made their on-site preparations so far back that no one would associate two surveyors and a baby bulldozer with Kurt von Fahlendorf’s disappearance. On the night they drove in quietly and without headlights; the cars were hidden from the jail by mounds of rubble, and they’re undoubtedly not the only cars to use the area—it’s a great place for steaming up the windows. Kurt was unconscious when they arrived, and they were probably not there longer than ten minutes. Holloman Jail isn’t a high security institution. Its wall guards are slapdash unless there’s genuine trouble, when they snap to attention efficiently enough, the Captain says.

  One of the two surveyors was a woman; women occupied all kinds of jobs these days, the first guard said. Indeed they do, sir! Look at me.

  Her journal was open, her colored pens arranged; Helen began to write, quite a lot of it in purple for her own theories.

  At six o’clock she rang Kurt’s bell, laden with Chinese food and a jeroboam of French champagne; she had decided that the huge bottle was more seductive than several ordinary ones, which had to be opened—a noisy procedure with champagne. The jeroboam meant one kept on pouring from an open vessel.

  Her first impression was that Kurt looked wonderful, rather than someone who had suffered over five days of imprisonment, most of it without water, all of it without food, and enduring pain as well as blood loss from a hacked off finger. His pale blue eyes were dancing with life; even his flaxen hair sparkled, and his tanned skin was smooth and supple.

  It was no hardship to kiss those full red lips; Helen was tall enough not to need to stand on tiptoe for a near six-footer, and fitted her mouth into his with pleasure, if not with passion. Why wasn’t there any passion? That was something she wondered about a great deal without so far finding an answer. In all her life, she reflected, no man had ever stirred her to passion. She had never had an orgasm; M.M.’s children would have died sooner than masturbate. Auto-eroticism was hideously shameful; it was, besides, unnecessary. Somewhere in the world lay that elusive state called a climax. She could wait.

  “Ice bucket, if it will fit,” she said, breaking the kiss. “Are you hungry? Shall we eat now, or heat the food up later and eat then?”

  “Later,” he said, busying himself with an oversized ice bucket and then opening the bottle. “Is this designed to get us drunk?” he asked. “If so, I’m all for it, my beautiful Helen. I miss the days when you wore your hair loose, therefore I have no love for your police career. So I shall get you drunk and undo it.”

  “Glass for glass,” she said with a challenge in her voice.

  He poured; they toasted with clinking glasses.

  “I know they’re going out of style, but I much prefer these saucers to the flutes,” he said, savoring the wine. “Neither you nor I has a big nose, admittedly, so we could drink comfortably from flutes, but think of those who do have big noses!”

  “Good lord!” she exclaimed. “You have a sense of humor!”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Well hidden.” She sipped. “Oh, I do love champagne! And, Kurt, I can’t think of a better reason to wallow in a saucer than celebrating your liberation. You look so good!”

  “I feel good,” he said.

  “What went through your mind during those nearly six days?”

  The handsome face hardly changed. “My life’s work. I had no room for anything else, and I never did finish. They have promised me a photographed wall—I do not know how else to say it, but I gather they connect each small photograph to those all around it in a way which makes it look like wallpaper. Then I can finish, and I will. I had never realized how important it is to have every single step of my research mathematically expressed as a continuum. I had reached within my last year, and so far I now know I have made no errors in my thinking. When my results are spread over three dozen papers, often repeated to make a paper legible, it is easy to lose track. To miss that one little step makes sense of it all.” The face had grown animated, enthusiastic. “If there are errors, they are in this last year of research, but I do not think so. I am right, Helen, I am right!”

  “Well, at least you’ve shown me where your priorities are.”

  “In the proper place, yes.”

  “So it wasn’t the specter of death loomed largest?”

  “Yes—and no. I just wanted to get my work completed before I died. Work was more important, even if death was certain.”

  “No wonder your colleagues admire you so much.”

  “You exaggerate,” he said.

  “No, I don’t. I’ve spoken to them throughout this business, and every last one of your colleagues is consumed with admiration for your passion—” She stopped, looked astonished. “Of course! That’s where the pass ion is! In our work!”

  “You have lost me.”

  “I know, and I’m going to leave you lost. Drink up, Kurt.”

  Three glasses, she decided, were optimum for her purposes: Helen struck.

  “Do you feel vengeful?” she asked as he took off her shoe and stocking; she had come garbed for seduction, no pantyhose.

  “At this moment,” he said, dunking her forefoot in his champagne, “I am more concerned with limiting my drinking by sucking champagne off your perfect toes.”

  She squealed and giggled. “Kurt, don’t! I’m ticklish!”

  “Wriggle away. I love it,” he mumbled.
>
  “Okay, but only for five minutes.”

  At the end of the five minutes she counted him down to zero, then grabbed his ears and pulled his head up.

  “Ow!”

  “If you had longer hair, I could use that, but a crew cut means it has to be your ears. No, sit up, Kurt, and pay attention to me! I want to be serious for a moment.”

  He obeyed, curiosity aroused. “Okay, my lovely Helen.”

  “Do you feel vengeful about your kidnapping?”

  “Yes, natürlich. Not so much for the inconvenience they caused me as the grief and anxiety they caused my family.”

  “Do you have any ideas or theories about who did it?”

  He looked puzzled. “No, not really. I was too consumed with writing my work on the walls.”

  “I have some ideas and theories.”

  He had reached for the jeroboam, but jerked his hand away. “No, I must not drink more. Tell me, Helen.”

  “Captain Carmine Delmonico isn’t just another small-city policeman, Kurt. He’s a fine detective—fine enough for me to choose the Holloman PD for my training as a detective. He came to conclusions that I share. The first is that your kidnappers are German, not American.”

  She had caught him; he was staring at her, confounded. “But that cannot be! German?”

  “Accept the fact that when it comes to crime, you’re a very ordinary guy,” Helen said. “Delmonico is the expert and I’m learning to be one. Believe me when I say that American kidnappers would have behaved differently from yours. And if they’re German, by extension they know you personally. Otherwise they wouldn’t have fixed on you, we think. With Baader-Meinhof running around in Germany, local kidnapping thinking would be going in quite a different direction. There’s also the fact that they knew when this trust fund for the grandchildren was going to be set up, and, compounding that, they have the pull to open an account with a prestigious Swiss bank. Riff-raff they’re not.”

  “Josef,” said Kurt in the back of his throat.

  “As to that, we don’t know. We’re not in a position to do any detective work in West Germany. Unless …”

  “Unless what?” Kurt asked, attention pricking.

  “Unless you conspire with me in a scheme that may not get any hard evidence, but will identify them.”

  “I am interested.”

  “First off, when are you due back at work?”

  “Whenever I feel up to it, Dean Gulrajani said. I said, at once.” Kurt grimaced. “I need to finish my walls.”

  “How about next Tuesday? “

  “Why? That’s four full days away.”

  “Four full days during which you and I can fly to Munich and I can do some investigating.” Her eyes, a much deeper blue than his, caught and held them. “I know your family would love to see you. It’s so small that there was no one to send here while you were missing, damn it, so I know they’d love to see you. And I know that you’re always telling Dagmar that you want to marry me. Well, I don’t say I will, but I am willing to go to Munich with you pretending to be your fiancée. It gives me a perfect reason to be with you. While we’re there, you can manufacture plenty of excuses to be alone with your family for hours at a time. I can use those hours snooping, but not in a way that will alert the Munich cops. On that, you have to trust me.”

  Kurt had listened the way highly intelligent people did, processing the content of what Helen said as she said it; now that she was ended, he had already made up his mind.

  “That is an excellent scheme,” he said, smiling, “but I am afraid we have left our run too late. Plane bookings have to be made, and tomorrow’s plane may be full.”

  “Plane bookings are made, the tickets are in my bag, and the plane isn’t full in first class,” said Helen.

  “First class?” He looked aghast. “Helen, that is wasteful! I do not mind traveling coach.”

  “You stingy old Scrooge! You’re a rich man, you can afford first class.”

  “It is a principle,” he said stiffly.

  “Then isn’t it lucky I’m paying? Miser! That’s a good reason not to marry you.”

  “You have your own money, it would not be a problem.”

  “Does this mean that if we were to visit Paris, you wouldn’t take me to the Tour d’ Argent?”

  “Most assuredly,” he said with that typical, slightly wrong choice of phrase. “Paris is full of restaurants just as good but far less expensive.”

  “I hereby serve you notice, Kurt, that if in future we ever need to fly together, I’ll be in first class and you in coach.”

  “I do not understand you, Helen.”

  “You don’t have to. Will you call Dagmar first thing tomorrow morning and tell her that we’re coming for the weekend?”

  “Of course. And, Helen?”

  “Yes?”

  “It is an excellent scheme.”

  “You mustn’t tell any of them, even Dagmar.”

  “I understand that. She is wonderfully loyal, but some of that loyalty is given to Josef. Were it not, she would have sent him packing when she found out about his industrial espionage.”

  “Good. Shall I heat the food?”

  “I think so. Your news has stimulated me to hunger.”

  “I’ll need a car,” she said later, as they ate.

  “You can use my Porsche.”

  “I might have known you’d have one stashed over there!”

  CHAPTER V

  Now that Kurt von Fahlendorf was safely flying off to Munich with Helen MacIntosh, Carmine could turn his attention back to other matters. Though the Dodo stood at the head of his list, it also contained Corey Marshall. His own enquiries into Morty Jones’s death could not be postponed a moment longer, though the official enquiry was set for November 11, a week after the elections; by then, memories would be blurred, attitudes hardened.

  When he poked his head around Corey’s door at five after eight, Corey wasn’t in; not a crime, but Carmine expected his lieutenants to be in before their men, and Buzz was there.

  Delia, he noted, was already hard at work, obviously celebrating Kurt’s survival with more festive raiment than usual: a frilly dress in shocking pink, yellow and black stripes, a matching bow on the back of her head. How she managed to type so rapidly and accurately with such long, manicured nails, he had no idea. Today they were painted shocking pink, and as always produced a secondary sound as she hammered away at the electric IBM with the heavy touch of one who had worked for years at manual machines. Hard on the heels of the wallop of the finger striking the center of the key came the click of the nail colliding with the edge of the key. Boom—click, boom—click, like a man in a lead boot with an aluminum knee joint. Wasted on the Dodo, Carmine thought, watching her; she needs one of those cases we don’t have at the moment, saturated with paper, lists, tables and computations.

  Even before he checked Corey’s office a second time at eight-thirty, Carmine could feel the sinking sensation invade the pit of his stomach. If there had been no love in what he felt, it would have been easier to bear, but there was love, and love meant hurt, broken bits of dreams, memories of days gone by when Corey had been magnificent.

  He was there, setting up his desk for the day.

  “What’s my new case?” he asked as Carmine walked in.

  “Time to talk about cases after we’ve talked about Morty,” Carmine said, sitting down.

  Corey hunched his shoulders. “There’s nothing to say. He hid his depression well.”

  “Oh, Cor, come on! I noticed, my team noticed, Abe and his team noticed. How can you sit there saying you didn’t notice, when I came asking you to fill out HPD Form 13l3? I wanted him to see Dr. Corning, you overruled me as Morty’s immediate boss, the one who’d notice most of all. A mere trainee, Helen MacIntosh, was left to go in search of him that morning. It should ha
ve been you, and you know it. What I don’t understand is why you chose to adopt that attitude to Morty. He was a sick man.”

  “It’s been blown up out of all proportion,” Corey said, voice hard. “There was nothing much wrong with Morty. What made him eat his gun was the sight of Ava all beat up, nothing else.”

  “You won’t save your skin by wearing a blindfold, Cor.”

  “What would you know about it, Carmine? I’ve been listening to Morty whine about Ava for ten months—it was nothing new, I tell you! Her leaving was the best thing could have happened to him—no more looking at every Holloman cop and wondering.”

  “I’m going to have to mention Form 1313 at the enquiry.”

  Corey gasped, staggered. “Carmine, you wouldn’t! It was internal, a discussion between the overall boss and the immediate boss—nobody’s business but ours.”

  “Everybody’s business, when the object of the discussion took his own life two weeks later,” Carmine said.

  “It was internal I tell you! You can’t mention it! Morty did not act depressed, and he had the drinking under control.”

  “Then how come he was almost never here?”

  “He had a bolt-hole in the cells.”

  “To sleep it off.”

  “No! To get away from that housekeeper Delia Carstairs found—he hated her.”

  “But the kids liked her fine, Netty Marciano reports. I know Morty used to say they cried for Ava all the time, but that was Morty confabulating,” said Carmine. Time Corey realized how far the gossip about Morty and his domestic situation extended.

  “Jesus, is nothing sacred?”

  “Not where Netty’s concerned, Cor. You know that.”

  “He went to the cells to see Virgil Simms,” Corey said, desperate to get Carmine off his back. “They’ve been pals since academy days. It’s not surprising that Morty would have gone to cry on Virgil’s shoulder, open his divorce papers there.”

  “I see.” Carmine got up, still seething.

  “Hey! Cases? And who’s to take Morty’s place?”

  “There won’t be a replacement until after the enquiry panel gives its findings, so you and Buzz will just have to jog along a man short until then,” Carmine said over his shoulder. “I want the pair of you back on the Taft High weapons cache. There are rumors that there’s a smoke and mirrors element. Put your hat on properly, Corey, and find out the truth.”