by David Wiltse
And here, at least, someone loved him and cared about his welfare.
Cooper put an arm around Swann's shoulders, feeling the knobby bones through the mottled skin. In full light, Swann's torso and legs were covered with freckles. For some reason only his face had been spared the spots. Cooper had learned to love them. His punk leaned his head against the big man's chest and continued to pray.
"Sweet Jesus," Swann implored, "bring your divine love to the heart of Darn ell Cooper the way be has brought love to mine. Let the light of your great goodness shine upon him. Deliver him from the pit. Cause him to dwell no more in the valley of the shadow, darling Lord, but lift him up to your mountaintop of light!"
"Amen," said Cooper, prematurely.
"And sweet Jesus, cleanse his mind of those thoughts which torment him.
Lift from him, Lord, those obscene fantasies that haunt his soul. Raise up his eyes so that they might dwell forever on your sweet goodness and look no more into the abyss Of the evil pit."
Swann shivered and Cooper did not know if he was cold or frightened. He himself was getting excited again.
When the punk got through praying, he was usually very receptive.,Sometimes he thought up new ways to do it.
His punk had a lot of imagination.
Karen had placed the envelope on the kitchen table for him and Becker left it there amid the crumpled napkins and the spilled remainders of Jack's breakfast cereal while he did the dishes and straightened the kitchen. Giving the table a swipe with the sponge, he worked around the letter as if afraid to soil his hands by touching it. Kitchen duty was a chore that Becker had assumed on his own; Karen had never mentioned it, he had never volunteered. On the first few mornings he had spent at her house, she had gotten Jack off to school, then departed for work herself while he was still reading the newspaper at the table.
"Just leave it," she had said, referring to the general litter while bending to give him a kiss. "I'll do it when I get home." Becker had not left it and it did not take long for her to stop urging him to do so.
The same process was at work when he gradually assumed the duties of dinner chef. He cooked the first, few times because it seemed unfair for her to have to launch into meal preparations as soon as she walked in the door. He cooked dinner a few times because he didn't like the frozen entrees and slapjack concoctions that Karen tossed together on her own.
After that he cooked because he realized he liked to, and because no one had ever told him he had to. Now, after living together for a year, Karen Still remembered every so often to say thank you, which Becker considered a surprise bonus. Jack never thought to voice his gratitude without prompting, but then Jack was ten and assumed that service was his due.
With the dishes rinsed and stacked in the dishwasher and the counters and tabletop cleaned and straightened, Becker was forced to regard the letter once more. It was addressed in typescript to "Agent John Becker" in care of "FBI, Washington, D.C." The envelope was plain white, ordinary stationery as unremarkable as the typewriting. With a sigh, Becker lifted the envelope by its edges. Whomever it was from, Becker didn't want to hear from him. FBI agents didn't receive friendly letters addressed to headquarters. They got angry letters, they got pleading letters, they got threatening letters from attorneys insinuating lawsuits, they got paranoid letters from screwballs concerned about UFOS. And, in Becker's case, there were letters from psychopaths.
More than one of the serial killers whom Becker had tracked and apprehended tried to stay in touch with him, as if their relationship had not been severed by incarceration. They wrote to him as if they knew him, as if they shared something in common, some deep affliction of the soul that had empowered Becker to find them-that had allowed them to be caught by one of their own. For these correspondents the twisted growth within their souls that made them the way they were was a source of exultation.
They loved their mania, clutched it gleefully, protected it fanatically.
He could sense their caged but unaltered joy like the cackle of the demented in every line they wrote.
They crooned to him from their prison cells and mental wards like wolves howling for a caged brother to join them. For Becker, his understanding of their dementia was a sickness that he had quit the Bureau in a vain attempt to expunge. If he was no more capable of reforming his soul than they were, at least he could avoid the exercise of his failings. He was like a man with allergies that medicine could not control. Unable to live cleanly in a certain place, Becker had taken himself elsewhere, out of the FBI, away from the antigens that plagued him.
But the crazies would not let him go, they called to him, singing their siren songs of mutuality through the mail, and the Bureau, conscientious good citizen that it was, acted as middleman, running him down with the messages of lunacy.
He slipped a paring knife under the flap and opened the envelope, then turned it over to shake out its contents, still reluctant to come into contact with it. The masthead of The New York Times floated to the table. Scissors had cut away the newspaper's motto, "All the News That was Fit to Print," on one side, and the weather information on the other, leaving intact only the name of the paper and the date immediately underneath. The edition was two years old.
Becker flipped the paper to its other side. There was the name CARTIER in large letters, Part of an advertisement which had been cut away, a portion of a female model's face that was part of an adjoining ad, and the word "News," the second half of "News Summary" having also been excised. Pinching just the tip of the paper, Becker held it up to the light, half expecting to see an "invisible" message scrawled in some lunatic's urine.
What he saw were tiny dots of light bleeding through the paper, poked with caution through the letters of the masthead by a pin. Above the masthead was another series of dots. On the reverse side of the paper, the holes in the masthead fell in the empty space of the illustrations used for the advertisements.
A game player, he thought. Someone wants me to cooperate so he can jerk me off at the same time he does himself.
But despite his annoyance, Becker rummaged through the extra bedroom that they called a family room until he found an old Scrabble set. For each letter in the masthead with a hole in it, Becker selected a lettered square from the Scrabble set and placed it on the table. The who and the w each had two holes, so he added an extra of each letter to his little pile. Taken in Order from the masthead, the letters spelled "hNwwooki." Placing the capitalized n first and following it with a vowel, Becker came up with "Now i howk. " Nothing more intelligible presented itself immediately, so he shuffled the tiles and tried again.
At the first random casting the letters formed the word wowikhno."
With rising exasperation, he reshuffled the letters, then again and yet again, trying to find words that made sense.
After ten minutes of effort his hands froze over the tiles.
His message was on the table before him.
"i know who."
"So you know who," Becker said aloud, his voice sounding strange in the empty house. "Who what? Or who cares?"
The dots that ran above the masthead took a bit longer to decipher. They were neatly, almost meticulously placed, as if they had been ruled off with a caliper. Applying a tape measure, Becker determined that they were precisely one eighth of an inch apart. In some cases two dots ran vertically and in some cases one stood alone. The vertical holes were also precisely one eighth of an inch from those below them. However, they were not systematically aligned with any of the letters in the masthead that ran below them. The dots were a message by themselves:
At first glance they looked to Becker like a broken box kite, and then like an old-fashioned door key. He played with the idea for a moment before deciding that the pattern didn't look much like a key after all.
Leaving the tiles and their message on the table, he paced the kitchen, wondering why he was taking the trouble in the first place.
Whoever had sent him the message had been s
mart enough, or knew Becker well enough, to make it a puzzle.
He knows my weakness, Becker thought. Or one of them at least. If the message had been straightforward, Becker might well have dismissed it out-of-hand, throwing it out joining this jerkoff in his activity. with the morning's trash. Now here I am, he thought, Disgusted with his correspondent, and with himself for accommodating the faceless ghoul, Becker reached out to crumble the bit of newsprint and its cryptic holes when he stopped, arrested suddenly by the date on the newspaper. There was nothing special about the date itself-, it rang no bells; Becker could recall nothing unusual about the day; but its very presence was strange. The man had cut away everything else from the paper that was irrelevant. Why had he left the date? The obvious answer was that the date was not irrelevant.
"i know who" meant he knew something about someone who did something on that date. And in that newspaper? The New York Times was a large newspaper; where was Becker supposed to find the "who"? The dots had to be a page number. The correspondent wanted Becker to solve this code, after all. He was trying to say something and he wanted to be heard, even if his listener had to work a bit first. He is confident that I will take the trouble, Becker reasoned, so he must be equally confident that I can break the code'. It can't be that much of a mystery. The punctured letters didn't amount to much of a code after all, just enough to avoid a cursory inspection.
Whatever the writer was trying to hide, he wasn't trying so hard that someone of average intelligence couldn't find it, Becker thought. The code was meant to be a puzzle, not a mystery, and puzzles, by their nature, can be solved.
Becker walked the mile and a half to the library, a stroll he took frequently to clarify his thoughts. He had replaced the masthead in its envelope and carried it with him in his pocket, feeling as if he were transporting something smelly and indecent. Traveling the clean, tree-lined sidewalks of Clamden, Connecticut, Becker felt like a dirty old man with pornography in his possession, as out-of place in this verdant patch of suburbia as a flasher in his trench coat.
Don't pursue this, he berated himself Whatever it is, it's no good for you, no matter how little you involve yourself. Alcoholics don't sip wines just to determine the source of the grapes. It's a quagmire, your entire association with that past life. Put a toe in to test the surface and you'll get sucked in again, right up to the neck.
Becker removed the envelope from his pocket and dropped it on the ground, then turned abruptly and walked back home, quickly, as if someone were after him. He had gone only a few hundred yards before he realized he was brushing his hand against his pant leg as if to cleanse it of something clinging to his fingers, like the slime trail of a garden slug.
At home Becker swept the Scrabble tiles into the box with his cupped hand and forearm and replaced the game in the family room. He straightened the kitchen once again, took out his well-worn copy of The Chinese Cookbook by Craig Claiborne and Virginia Lee and leafed through it in search of a recipe for the evening's meal.
He felt clean, he felt virtuous, like a former addict who has passed up a fix; he had been tested and found strong.
Ten minutes later Becker found the envelope where he had dropped it. He picked it up and continued his walk to the library, where he found a primer on computers and refreshed himself on binary code.
Counting with a base of two rather than civilization's customary ten was simple enough once the method was understood. Becker remembered it from the years when he had devoted himself to computers, but felt it wise to check his calculations against the book.
Assuming the two dots aligned vertically meant 1 and the dots that stood alone represented zero, the number in binary code was: 10011 In the decimal system, the ones and zeros translated to the number 19.
The librarian at the information desk, identified by the brass plate in front of her as June Atchinson, showed Becker how to operate the microfilm machine and where to find the files of film of back copies of The New York Times.
She knew Becker-most people in Clamden knew him or knew of him-but only a few were able to differentiate between the man they saw and the man they had heard about. To June he seemed a pleasant, unfailingly polite and frequent visitor to the library, but when she looked at him it was impossible for her to dismiss the stories she had heard. The FBI agent with too many deaths to his credit-if credit was the right word. A man whose talents were too much like the predilections of those he hunted.
It was all rumor, of course, but it stuck to his image all the stronger because of that. June chided herself for crediting the rumors-she liked to think of herself as a better person than that-but the stories were too persistent to ignore. He was a good-looking man, virile, with the appearance of strength despite middle age, but with nothing about him to suggest a hidden and rapacious bloodlust.
She watched him with open curiosity as he worked the microfilm machine.
Becker was aware of her attention as he was normally aware of most of what went on about him, the habit of watchfulness never having left him, The FBI had taught him a form of reasonable paranoia, and Becker had refined it with an attention to nuance that had made him extraordinarily effective. He was also conscious of his reputation and was glad the real story was not known. The truth was worse than the rumors and was known only by his therapist, and then only in part. Even Becker did not know the whole truth about himself, although he worked at it with a diligence made possible only by his high tolerance for psychic pain.
He found the Times that matched the date on the masthead and turned the knob of. the machine, watching the blurred catalogue of the day's events flash by until he reached page 19.
There were stories about the apple industry and the suicide doctor, but the item sought by Becker leaped at him from a tiny box in the lower left corner, a throwaway story sent over the AP wire and beloved by editors because it was just the right size to fill small holes in the page's layout. The headline read, "Body Found in Coal Mine."
The dateline was Hendricks, West Virginia, and the story told in terse journalistic prose of the discovery of the body of a twenty-year-old woman in a branch shaft of an abandoned mine. The woman had been identified by her dental records as a local girl who had been reported missing nearly three years earlier. No details were given concerning the cause of death, and Becker could imagine that after three years in a mineshaft there would be little soft tissue remaining on which to perform an autopsy. The story went on to say that foul play was suspected-although no reason was given for the conclusion-and that a broader search of the mine was to be undertaken.
Becker lifted his head from the black and white of the microfilm and widened his eyes as if trying to awaken from a sleep. He did not know how long he had been staring at the newspaper article, but his mind had leaped through the machine and into the darkness of the West Virginia mine where a girl's body lay on the gouged and routed floor of rock. He did not see her as she must have been found, a pile of bones encased in rags, but as she must have died, a living person, fearful, panicked, in pain.
In his imagination she had just been killed and Becker was there beside her, feeling the last warmth of her body, her final breath still hanging above her, still distinct amid the chilly ambient air of the mine. The sound of her final cry faded away in the vastness of her grave and over it Becker could hear another, frightening sound. It was her killer's breathing, rapid, excited, orgasmic. Becker could sense the man behind him, looking at the girl over Becker's shoulder, leaning in close, as close as Becker himself, savoring the death. Becker was aware of the man's leering smile, his dancing eyes, his nostrils flared in the effort to suck in the girl's last breath. Without turning to look, Becker knew the light was already fading from the killer's eyes, the climactic feeling passing from his soul. Whatever he had done to her, however long it had taken, however much trouble it had caused him, it had been worth it. The killer had what he wanted and Becker could feel his final trembling sighs of satisfaction ruffle the air them both. The purr of a mo
nster.
Becker returned to the present with a shudder and saw the librarian quickly dipping her eyes back to her own desk. The colors of the day swept back to him, the relaxed quiet of the library replaced the deathly stillness of the mine, the humid cold of underground gave way to the gentle warmth of the building. He was among the living, sitting among the ordinary, surrounded by the comfortably mundane. There were no monsters in the library. Except himself.
The librarian looked at him quizzically, then rose and crossed towards him. Becker realized he had been staring blankly in her direction.
"Everything all right?" she asked.
Becker regarded her quizzically for a moment before he understood that she was referring to his use of the microfilm viewer.
"Oh, yes, fine."
"It's kind of an old system now," she said. "But it still works."
"Is it common?" Becker asked. "I mean, storing The New York Times. Do most libraries do it?"
"I don't know about most," June said. "Certainly a lot of them. It is the newspaper of record in the country, after all. We only go back twenty years, but I'm sure some larger libraries go back much farther.
Was there a particular year you wanted?"
"I was just wondering where I would find a two-year-old copy of the Times, the actual newspaper."