Naked Cruelty

by Colleen McCullough

  She was petrified, understanding that this was her only chance at winning. From the moment when he had stood forth in all the glory of his alter ego, he had cast her into paroxysms of fear. Cold and dark as outer space, he was a creature inhabiting a lightless human body, obsessed with the spectacle of terror and the ecstasy of someone else’s suffering.

  But her fear was not for her own torture and death. It was terror that she might fail. She couldn’t fail, she couldn’t!

  “Do you take the rests so that you can get it up again?” she asked, interrupting his concentration.

  He looked up, startled, and, as she had hoped, didn’t notice how far she had moved.

  “Even you cannot inspire me to frenzy,” he said, sneering.

  “Have you ever achieved orgasm?”

  A look of horrified prudery came over his face. “Disgusting! You are disgusting! Things like that are not your business!”

  “What utter crap! Do you come, Kurt?”

  Now he was really angry, past noticing that she was moving.

  “Immoral! You are immoral!”

  A few more inches. Nearly there, nearly there …

  He rose from the white velvet chair and stormed toward the bed, face contorted in fury; it was then that Helen saw the silenced .22 on the bedside table next to him. But it was her advantage. Even as she twisted her body up to a sitting position while he, astounded, gaped at her, Helen’s hand came up holding her gun, safety off, round in the chamber. She shot him in the right chest. He leaped backward to sprawl on the fluffy white floor, staring up at her as the pink bubbles gathered on his lips.

  “You’re going to be as dead as a dodo, Kurt,” she said, swinging her legs on to the carpet well clear of the growing, wet red stain. “Can you still speak?”

  He tried, but coughed instead; his hands flailed.

  “Afraid of dying, Kurt?”

  That provoked extreme agitation. “This is an excellent apartment, quite sound-proof,” she said in a relaxed, chatty voice. “No one will hear my gun as anything except far-off backfires. I will call the police, of course. When I feel like it. I’m going to make you suffer first. A gut shot. My, it will hurt!”

  The squat, ugly muzzle came up; the pistol roared.

  Kurt screamed, a thin, fluid sound.

  “I don’t think that hit a major artery,” she said, “but you can always hope it did. No, no artery! Just liver and gut.”

  His screams were dwindling, the pink foam spilling from his mouth, the blood from the gut shot dark and venous.

  She kept talking to him, though whether at the end he heard her, Helen didn’t know.

  Only after the last life died from his eyes did she shoot him in the heart. “Show’s over,” she said, looking at her naked body. “No way any cops are going to see this.” She went to her dressing room and slipped on a silk robe, then went to her study and picked up the phone.

  “Captain Delmonico? This is Helen MacIntosh. I’ve killed the Dodo in my new apartment at Busquash Inlet. It belonged to Amanda Warburton. Will you organize things, please?”

  When Carmine arrived with Delia, she was sitting on the far side of the bed from Kurt von Fahlendorf’s body, composed and displaying no symptoms of shock.

  “What happened? The full story,” he said, standing where he could see her, but not too close.

  She told him lucidly and plainly; it was, he thought, the most exemplary narration by a killer that he had ever heard; she had learned her lessons well.

  “The Commissioner was right not to switch to these cuffs, Captain. Kurt saw them in my study and used them—lucky for me! I did a Houdini while he read his book. My hands are much smaller than yours. I knew how to work them so the ratchet didn’t move.”

  “Irony in operation,” Carmine said.

  “You knew he was the Dodo,” she accused.

  “After reading your journals, yes. That can be your first examination, next Monday morning. Go through them and find out what gave Kurt away. It’s all there.”

  “The paperweight?”

  “Yes. The little colored glass trails going in all directions look like the tracks of sub-atomic particles. I saw it because I read science magazines.”

  “And I saw it because Kurt had shown me photos, but then I forgot until tonight. My memory needs honing.” She looked disapproving. “Why didn’t you arrest him, Captain?”

  “It had better be Carmine from now on, Helen. There was no tangible evidence. My big mistake was in thinking he’d never put you on his victims list. You didn’t fit the stereotype in so far as he had one. For example, you were too aggressive. You were a source of information—he read your journals until I saw the light and locked them up. My last mistake,” Carmine said, “was in underestimating the depth of his madness.”

  “What about girls who did fit the stereotype, Carmine?” Delia asked. “We had so much trouble finding them.”

  “That was because we never managed to refine our list of qualities that appealed to him,” Carmine said. “You and Helen exhausted yourselves looking, but always in something of a fog. Even now, do we really know all the qualities?”

  “No,” said Helen. “He gave himself away to me over dinner tonight. I don’t know if he intended to, or not. It also came as a shock to him that I’d left Talisman Towers, moved out of Carew. Living in Carew is a definite, I believe now.”

  This little madam is as tough as old army boots, thought Delia as she listened. Oh, she’ll undergo a reaction later on tonight, but nothing a battle-hardened veteran wouldn’t. She is going to be one of those cops around whom criminals steer a wide berth. Dainty and deadly, that’s Helen. I’m glad I like her, but I understand why none of our male detectives do.

  “You’re a crack shot, Helen,” Delia said suddenly . “Why didn’t you go for his head?”

  “I was so awkwardly positioned,” Helen said, a falter creeping into her voice. “He and I were on almost the same plane, it was like standing sideways to a target. The second shot went into his belly because right at the moment I squeezed the trigger, he leaped in the air. Finally he was right—that was the heart shot.”

  “You won’t go to trial, but there will be an internal police enquiry,” Carmine said. “Just tell them that, and don’t lose any sleep. When an officer lethally discharges a firearm, it’s inevitable.”

  Her eyes filled with tears, she shivered. “I know all that! Don’t forget that I’ve been a police officer for three years.”

  Ah! Signs of tension at last. Thank God for that. Carmine had begun to wonder at her self-control, forgetting she was M.M.’s daughter. Much steel there. “Kurt’s house can wait,” he said.

  “I won’t be able to participate?” Helen asked.

  “No. The Commissioner hasn’t taken your badge and gun. You can work anything except the Dodo—as a trainee. However, by the end of January I think you can start looking for a proper job.”

  Her face lit up. “Captain! Carmine! That’s wonderful.”

  “Take comfort from the fact that I’ll never have another trainee half as good. Which makes me doubly sorry for this shooting.”

  “You mean there’s no vacancy for me here, sir?”

  “I’m afraid not, Helen. We still have a pool of eligible men to wade through. Where would you like to go from here?”

  “I’ll have to think about that.”

  “You do pick odd moments to dispense earth-shaking news,” Delia said as they put their coats on in the hall.

  “She’s not nearly as composed as she looks,” Carmine said. “She needed a boost, and her fate is decided.”

  “I offered to stay, but she wouldn’t hear of it,” Delia said. “She announced that she’ll sleep on a living room couch—apparently she hasn’t furnished the other bedrooms yet. Knowing she’s still in the throes of decorating makes me hope she does take my
one piece of good advice.”

  “What advice, Deels?” Carmine pulled the fur flaps of his Russian hat down; it was way below freezing outside.

  “I told her not to have a white carpet.”

  There was a further job to do that could have been done from Helen’s apartment, but Carmine waited until he was back in his office. He picked through the contents of her bag, surrendered as part of the investigation, and found her private notebook. Dagmar’s phone numbers were under F for Fahlendorf; he hadn’t expected Helen to get that wrong, nor had she. Eyes on the railroad clock, he decided Dagmar might have opened her office. The workload must have increased after Josef’s death, unless he had done a literal nothing for his fat pay check.

  She answered with her first name: a very private line.

  “Frau von Fahlendorf, this is Carmine Delmonico of the Holloman Police.”

  “Yes, Captain?”

  “I’m very much afraid I have bad news, ma’am. Your brother, Kurt, died a short time ago.”

  When he ceased to speak, only the curious wrongness of the silence told him she was still listening; a broken connection was different, deader.

  “Frau von Fahlendorf?”

  “Yes, I am here. Kurt died? Kurt?” The incredulity was very apparent. Then, “My little Kurtchen? How?”

  “He was shot, ma’am, trying to kill a police officer.”

  “You imply Kurt was trying to commit murder?”

  “He had already murdered, ma’am. Professor von Fahlendorf was the rapist-killer known as the Dodo,” Carmine said.

  Another silence ensued, one Carmine for the life of him couldn’t find words to break; it stretched on and on.

  At last she spoke. “Are you sure the name is Dodo? Are you sure Kurt and this Dodo are one and the same?”

  “Positive, Frau von Fahlendorf. Positive.”

  “How strange that Kurt would choose Didus ineptus! That is the bird you mean by dodo?”

  “Yes, it is. Why is it strange?”

  “When Kurt was a dunce at chemistry, our father always called him a dodo, too stupid to prevent his own extinction. He meant that Kurt was too stupid to perpetuate the family.”

  No use! Carmine was thinking. Kurt’s psychopathology dates from an earlier age than his teens and chemistry. But I’ll ask.

  “How old was Kurt at that time?”

  “Three—four. He had a brain, we knew that, but Papa was convinced his destiny lay in chemistry,” said Dagmar.

  Too flip, far too flip. Why is she lying?

  “And that’s it, Frau von Fahlendorf?”

  “It is all I can think of.”

  He cleared his throat. “Er—the funeral, ma’am. Do you wish the body sent home?”

  “I will make the arrangements, Captain. Privacy is all.”

  The most intriguing thing he had learned was that the Frau hadn’t really been surprised. Grief showed, then flickered out; Kurt’s sister had been waiting for news like this since—when? His flight to Chubb? Or the chemistry dunce? Though the question that plagued Carmine most was why Kurt the Dodo had attacked Helen.

  As always, his only confidante would be Desdemona.

  The guest annex at Kurt von Fahlendorf’s house was not where he stored his operational gear; when it was searched at the time of his kidnapping it must have had the Dodo’s souvenired books on display, but no one had known their titles, so their significance wasn’t understood. Now they were joined by a glass paperweight and the glass teddy bear, both exhibited against a black background.

  “I wonder why he stole the teddy bear?” Delia asked. “He had no intention of selling it, did he?”

  “His original intention was simply to remove it from any location where Helen could see it,” Carmine said. “None of us knew exactly how friendly Helen had become with Amanda Warburton, but Kurt knew. Don’t forget too that he read her journals, in which she admired the glass teddy bear enormously. She was very proud of her skill in discovering the nature of its eyes.”

  “But we did know how friendly she was with Amanda,” Delia objected. “She acted under your instructions.”

  “Maybe I instructed her, but the friendship wasn’t counterfeit. Kurt was insanely jealous, so much so that his imagination turned her journals into diaries written in a code he couldn’t crack.”

  “But they weren’t diaries in a true sense!” Delia cried.

  “No code either. Just the tortured thinking patterns of a madman. By the time he broke into the glass shop to steal the teddy bear he was hardly able to keep up a front of sanity. I had his boss, Dean Gulrajani, on my phone at the crack of dawn this morning begging for help. He put the change in Kurt down to the kidnapping, but then admitted it had started when Jane Trefusis, a woman physicist, joined the lab. Kurt hated her.”

  “Why murder those two nice, harmless people?” Delia asked.

  “My theory is that he thought Amanda was really Helen, and Hank Murray was a new boyfriend. He’d read Helen’s early notebooks, where she’d raved about the glass teddy bear.”

  “I know he squired Helen around,” Nick said, “but did he honestly love her? Was he capable of that much reality?”

  “No, but he thought he was. His fixation on Helen was multi-layered, and a big section was devoted to his family, how they would react to an American wife. Helen was the only one who fitted. By definition, the teddy bear was hers.”

  “Then who was the Vandal?” Nick asked.

  “Hank Murray. It couldn’t have been anyone else. He used the Vandal to establish a friendship with Amanda, to whom he was strongly attracted. The trouble was, he had nothing to offer her financially, and his past was shady—no one seems to know whether he took a knife to his wife, or she took it to him. It does seem that he was scared stiff of a trial and its verdict.”

  The three of them emerged from Kurt’s house to find Robert and Gordon Warburton lying in wait for them.

  “We hear Kurt’s as dead as a dodo,” Robbie said, giggling.

  “That joke is worn out by now,” Carmine said wearily.

  “Is it true? Is it really true?” Gordie squeaked.

  They look like gnomes, Carmine thought, though they aren’t small, or ugly, or misshapen. Other-worldly? No, more sub-wordly. Then it hit him: they were from Mars.

  Since it would be on the news, Carmine nodded. “Yes.”

  “Didn’t I always tell you?” Gordie asked Robbie. “A villain! A dyed-in-the-wool villain!”

  “A dyed-in-the-synthetic villain, from that background.”

  Carmine had to smile: they were witty.

  “A professor of physics named Kurt

  Played with radioactive dirt;

  Even God on high

  Got some in his eye,

  And cast Kurt into Hell for the hurt,” said Robbie.

  “You’re probably right about Kurt’s ultimate destiny,” Carmine said. “Do you coin your limericks on the spot?”

  “Of course,” said Robbie. “That’s why ‘radioactive’ doesn’t scan properly. Never mind, never mind!”

  Gordie rushed into speech. “Captain, Robbie and I had this genius idea for an original screenplay!” The greenish eyes slid sideways in a remarkable suggestion of cold and ruthless passion; a quick glance at the other twin revealed the identical look. “Even now it’s finished and copyrighted, a few weeks can see a stolen version out before we could get ours off the ground. We don’t know any real moguls!” Now there was a hint of persecuted desperation in his voice, and his eyes were wild with fear; the other twin’s look was identical. How do they do it?

  “Oh, shut up, Gordie!” Robbie said irritably. “Not that Gordie’s picture is too pessimistic, Captain, it isn’t. It’s more that he bewilders rather than enlightens.”

  “Correct,” said Carmine, settling to enjoy the situation. “Enlighten me, Robe
rt—if indeed I address Robert?”

  “You do because I am,” said Robert. “Gordie isn’t wrong, Captain, I do assure you. Our screenplay will be pinched, tweaked and bowdlerized out of all recognition, especially the legal kind, leaving us with something no longer original.” He drew Carmine farther away from Delia and Nick. “It has come to our attention, Captain, that Myron Mendel Mandelbaum is your best friend. In fact, that you share a wife. We have been working maniacally to finish our Grand Guignol, which we beg you to read. It’s complete down to the story boards—Gordie is a brilliant, brilliant artist.”

  “Story boards?” Carmine asked blankly.

  “Yes. Imagine your favorite movie drawn as a gigantic comic book—they’re the story boards. Film is a visual medium, and its purveyors are not fond of reading words. In fact, words are enemies. Reduced to a comic, any Hollywood dodo—oops!—idiot can grasp its plot and substance.” Robbie pulled a face. “I fear that characterization is another matter.”

  “You want me to ask Mr. Mandelbaum to grant you an audience?” asked Carmine, loving it.

  “Yes, exactly! Our screenplay is perfect for him, but we can’t even get through his outer defenses. If we could just see him in person, I know he’d go for our project! Blood out of Stone may not win any Academy Awards, but it will make gazillions!”

  “That’s sure to appeal to Mr. Mandelbaum,” said Carmine with a grin. “If I get you your audience, will you promise to keep out of my way?”

  Robbie gave a theatrical gasp and wrung his hands together. “Captain, Captain, if you do that, you won’t even see our dust!”

  “Then it’s a deal.” Carmine glanced at his watch. “By now he’ll be at his office. Can I use your phone?”

  “Does a fat baby fart? Of course you can!”

  The Warburton twins cavorting in joyous circles around him, Carmine entered their house and stopped. A ghastly head, bloated and greenish, was fixed to the wall in front of him.

  “That’s Arthur de Mortain,” Gordie said. “Number one in the Stone Man’s trail of victims. They are all descended from King Arthur and his legitimate French wife, Ghislaine.”