by Greg Iles
I tasted bile in my throat.
“Remember the mills of the gods, Harper. You know the reference? Of course not.”
While I stared in disbelief, Berkmann unbuckled his pants, dropped them to the floor along with his underwear, and stepped out of the disordered pile.
“The husk falls away,” he said.
Then he lifted his left arm above his head as if holding something in his clenched fist, cocked his right arm at his side, and became utterly still. Every muscle in his body defined itself in bas-relief beneath his alabaster flesh. Without ever seeing the actual statue, I knew that I was looking at Cellini’s Perseus.
I was still trying to take in the enormity of Berkmann’s madness when he burst into fluid motion, whirling from one edge of the video frame to the other. It could have been a ritual dance or the mindless flailings of a lunatic. His voice, so resonant before, became an atonal blare, howling syllables that my mind could not form into any known language. I had the sense that I’d stumbled into a hillbilly Pentecostal church where men and women rolled on the floor with poisonous snakes and gibbered in tongues. But the man on my television screen was no hillbilly.
I started in the chair when he ducked down and came up with Erin’s body in his arms. Without missing a beat, he began twirling her corpse around the room in a grotesque parody of a waltz. Erin’s head hung limp on her chest, like the head of a broken bird. Berkmann held her in perfect ballroom position as he danced, and it struck me that he must possess demonic strength to hold a dead body suspended that way. Each time he wheeled toward the camera, he made sure his eyes met the lens, boring into mine as I gaped at the knife wound in Erin’s back. Finally-as though from boredom rather than fatigue-he danced Erin’s body over to the corner and gently laid it behind my bed, where Drewe would later discover it.
I thought I might have to run to the bathroom to be sick, but Berkmann stopped me by prancing up to the camera and aiming it toward my bed. Staying within the camera’s field of view, he walked to the bed, reached up over it, and took one of my guitars down from the wall. It was a Martin, a prewar model I’d bought with one of my first big trading checks. Berkmann looked back at the camera and said, “ You’re the singer, aren’t you?”
Then he pressed the instrument against his stomach as if coupling with it. It took me a second to realize what he was doing. He had slipped his uncircumcised penis to the side of the strings-into the sound hole-and begun urinating loudly, all the while watching me with rapture on his face.
“What a lovely sound,” he said. Then he cackled.
When he finished, he shook himself off and hung the guitar exactly where he’d found it. I glanced away from the TV screen long enough to verify that the Martin was still there. It was.
“Oh,” he said, as though he’d forgotten to leave a tip in a restaurant. He went to his discarded clothes and took something from a pocket. It looked like a long metal film canister. He straightened up and hefted it in his hand like a man feeling the weight of a cigar. “I harvested these before I realized Erin wasn’t who I thought she was. I saw she wasn’t menstruating, and took a chance she might be ovulating. No point in keeping them now, of course.”
He walked back to the bed and opened one end of the canister. A cloud of pale vapor swirled out. Then he leaned over the bed, slid the open end of the canister into the sound hole of the guitar he had urinated into, and shook the contents into it.
As rapidly as the manic phase had come over him, it ended, leaving only the demonic intensity and the frigid blue eyes. He stepped very close to the lens, so that his blurred face filled the frame, and said, “Save this tape, Harper. We’re forever joined now, we whose lovers killed each other. You can’t show it to anyone, though, can you? Not unless you want to acknowledge Holly.” His breath fogged the lens. “Do you want to do that?”
He pulled back then, and as his cruel smile faded he said with the gravity of a prophet: “Remember, Harper. We are all broken from within.”
Then he reached up to the camera and the screen went black.
After my heartbeat steadied, I stood up and took the treasured Martin down from the wall, walked out the back door, and laid it faceup in the yard. Then I went to the utility shed, got a gasoline can, and doused the guitar from head to strap peg. With newspaper and matches from the kitchen, I began tossing flaming balls of paper at the Martin from the back door. The third one hit the seasoned wooden face, and eighteen thousand dollars worth of handmade guitar and part of my sister-in-law exploded into fire. The sounds the Martin made as it died were like bones breaking and tendons snapping, and in ten minutes there was nothing left but tuning pegs and charred steel strings.
Miles and Daniel Baxter were standing outside Berkmann’s Manhattan brownstone when I called Miles’s rented cellular. Baxter was about to leave for Connecticut, to oversee the search for Berkmann’s killing house, which he thought might be in the area of the Darien airstrip. Baxter thought Berkmann’s frankness about his identity on the videotape indicated that he’d left my house with the intention of fleeing the country. I didn’t explain that Berkmann thought I would never mention the tape to the FBI. Instead, I pointed out that he had been flying north, not south, when his plane went down.
Baxter asked me to overnight the original tape to him at Quantico. I agreed, though I intended to send him a VHS copy, appropriately edited. Baxter also thought Berkmann’s knife wound lent some credence to the plane crash scenario.
Miles disagreed, but I couldn’t tell whether he’d used logic to form that opinion or whether he was merely hoping Berkmann had survived the crash so that he could kill him with his own hands.
After hanging up, I shuffled through my desk drawer until I found the number I wanted, then dialed McLean, Virginia. The phone rang ten times before Arthur Lenz answered.
“I have no interest in talking to you,” he said.
“I don’t believe you, Doctor.”
“Believe it. You’re speaking to a chastened man.”
“So are you. Are you up to date on the EROS case?”
“Daniel has cut off my information. He says it’s for my own good.”
“So you don’t know what happened last night?”
“I still have a few loyal friends in the Unit. You’re referring to the murder of a Mrs. Graham and an unknown female of Indian descent?”
“Yes. Did you know that Mrs. Graham was my wife’s sister? The ‘Erin’ I told you about in your car?”
A brief silence. “The mother of your child?”
“Right.”
“I didn’t.”
“Then you don’t know it was me who drew the killer straight to her.”
“Drew him how?”
“By doing exactly what you did.”
“Pretending to be a female EROS client?”
“Yes. Erin Graham, to be exact. I used my own guilty secret as bait, but I told it from her point of view.”
“And you succeeded where I failed.”
“All I succeeded in doing was getting someone I cared about killed.”
“No. You fooled Strobekker, didn’t you? He believed you were actually the woman he went to kill.”
I suddenly realized Lenz had no idea that Berkmann had been identified. “Look, I’m calling because I’ve got about twenty pages of conversation between myself and the killer. I’ve also got a video of him that looks like something from a Fellini film. I’d like you to look at it.”
“Why would I want to do that?”
“Because his whole background is there. His entire family going back three generations. It’s got to be a gold mine in terms of forensic psychiatry.”
Lenz said nothing.
“He’s a third-generation physician, Doctor.”
A sharp intake of air.
“Nobody told you that? Baxter has a team of shrinks going over his house right now.”
“They know who he is?”
“Yep. No more UNSUB. His name is Edward Berkmann.”
“Edward Berkmann!”
“Know him?”
“Not personally, but I know his work. My God. Neurobiological modeling of the brain using computers. His father was an innovative analyst. Richard Berkmann. Discredited now, of course. My God.”
“What would you say if I told you Edward Berkmann was the child of an incestuous relationship?”
“What type? Father-daughter?”
“Brother-sister.”
“I’ll look at what you have. What exactly do you want from me?”
“The police think Berkmann’s dead. I don’t.”
“Does Daniel think he’s dead?”
“I don’t know.”
“I can’t tell you whether he’s alive or dead, Cole.”
“I know that. I just want you to look at everything and, on the assumption that he’s still alive, try to predict what he’ll do.”
“That could be very difficult.”
“I only care about one thing. Will he run, or will he come back for me and my family?”
“Ah. I might be able to do that. Edward Berkmann. I could never have imagined it.”
“Wait till you see the video.”
Lenz’s voice recedes to a blurry distance. “Tell me, Cole, are you experiencing strong urges for revenge?”
“You know the answer to that. What about you?”
“I’d like to shave off his skin an ounce at a time.”
“You don’t sound that angry.”
“I’m not a demonstrative man. But contrary to what you saw when you met her, my wife was once a beautiful and gracious woman.”
“I believe you.”
“The man who killed her so brutally should pay for what he did.”
“If he’s still alive.”
“Fax your pages through. Overnight a copy of the video. It may take some time. Some of my case materials were stolen the night my wife died. I’ll call you when I have something.”
“One second, Doctor. What are the mills of the gods?”
“The mills of the gods?”
“It must be a quote or something. He told me to remember the mills of the gods.”
“Ah. It is a quote. ‘The mills of the gods grind slowly, but they grind to powder.’ ”
“Meaning?”
“It may take a while, but we all get what’s coming to us.”
“I can’t argue with that.”
Lenz hung up without a word.
I rewound Berkmann’s video, plugged a blank VHS tape into my VCR, and started dubbing a copy. Then I called Sheriff Buckner’s office and again demanded that he provide round-the-clock security for the Anderson family, and also for me. He told me he already had people on Bob’s house (for political reasons, I knew) and that he would assign one deputy to watch my house after dark.
The last shell of the afternoon exploded thirty minutes later. I was lying on the sofa in the front room, trying to stay awake, when the phone rang in my office. I heaved myself up and went in to screen the call, sure it would be another reporter trying to worm his way into the story.
When Drewe’s voice came from the answering machine, gooseflesh rose on my arms. “It’s me” was all she said, but those two words affected me more deeply than Berkmann’s whole twisted tirade. I reached for the receiver, then froze as her next words tumbled out of the machine.
“Please don’t pick up if you’re there. Please, I mean it. I’m calling to ask you-to tell you-that you shouldn’t come to the funeral tomorrow. Daddy’s gone to pieces. He’s at the funeral home right now, sitting a vigil over Erin’s body like they did in the old days. He won’t let anyone else do it. It’s almost like he’s trying to protect her, even though it’s too late. I shouldn’t care what happens to you, but for your sake, and for his, please don’t go to the funeral. Please. Daddy needs to blame someone for what happened, and you’re the most convenient target.”
She paused, and I stood like a condemned man in the hiss of blank tape. “As far as what you told me… I can’t even think about it. But I know it’s true. Maybe I’ve always known it. Don’t call me, Harper. I mean that. Don’t try to see me, and don’t come to the funeral. If you have any respect left for me, don’t come. Good-bye.”
I snatched up the phone then, yelling, “Drewe! Wait!” but she clicked off even before I got the words out. Blinking like a punch-drunk fighter, I heard a horn honk outside.
From the window I watched a white sheriff’s cruiser pull into our drive. Its driver executed a three-point turn and parked nose-out toward the highway. Buckner must have decided I rated daylight security as well.
Now I lie on Drewe’s bed, my face buried in her pillow, trying to catch the scent of her like some lovesick teenager. But I’m no teenager. I’m a heartsick man who broke his own rule and told the truth, only to find out he was a fool for doing it or else did it too late.
Fatigue conjures strange thoughts. I once believed that all men existed on a continuum of behavior, some leaning to the moral side, others the immoral or even amoral, yet all having the capacity through circumstance to end up at either extreme. It’s a common conceit, I suppose, the idea that but for the grace of God or fate or chance, any of us could be walking in anyone else’s shoes. But as the ticking of my brain slows, an onslaught of images from the Berkmann tape assails me, none more monstrous than the desecration of Erin’s corpse by the grotesque death waltz. Hovering in that half-waking state on the ledge of sleep, I realize that on this earth walk beings who inhabit the shells of men but are not men. They are Other. And somewhere deep within me, in the cells of my blood, pulses a cold current of preverbal knowledge, a tribal memory absorbed and distilled to savage instinct, needing no voice to speak with all-consuming power: That which is Other must be destroyed.
CHAPTER 44
Drewe told me not to go to Erin’s funeral, but she said nothing about the burial. The funeral service was at three p.m. It’s nearly four-thirty as I drive into the Cairo County cemetery through the back entrance, passing the long utility shed surrounded by yellow backhoes and a rusted fleet of lawn mowers. The cemetery superintendent’s office looks like a good place to conceal the Explorer from casual view.
As I make for the small building, I think of Miles. He called this morning to give me an update on the hunt for Berkmann’s hidden killing house. Baxter’s teams have been searching the area surrounding the Connecticut airstrip, but Miles, always the contrarian, has been combing the streets of Harlem and Washington Heights, moving in concentric semicircles away from the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, which backs against the Hudson River like an island of succor rising from the squalor of the upper Hundreds.
Parking the Explorer behind the superintendent’s office, I get my guitar case out of the back and begin walking slowly toward the Anderson family plot. It lies a hundred yards to the west. I’ve been there many times with Drewe. Five generations of Andersons rest in that ground, from infants who died of diphtheria to soldiers who survived whatever war fell to them and returned to the Delta to die of old age. Today it is marked by the green pavilion tent of Marsaw’s Funeral Home, which rises out of the ground like a general’s field headquarters amid an army of stones. From the west comes the invading force, the living, a seemingly endless line of slow-moving automobiles fronted by an advance guard of dark-suited infantry. I select a mausoleum for temporary cover, a thick-walled edifice of marble and stone about sixty yards from the funeral tent. Two stone vases adorn its wrought-iron door, and one of them makes a serviceable stool.
Erin’s burial is like most others I’ve seen, only larger. The entire town of Rain is present, a blue-brown blanket of polyester dotted by the dark silks of expensively clothed people from Vicksburg and Greenville and Clarksdale and Memphis. I see several doctors from Jackson-colleagues of Drewe’s or Patrick’s-and at the periphery, standing apart from the rest, a couple of tall, stunningly dressed and coiffed young women accompanied by a gray-hatted man wearing dark sunglasses. Friends of Erin’s from he
r New York days. I’m surprised any of them showed.
I can’t see Drewe, but she must be seated under the sun-bleached tent. She’ll be holding one parent’s hand in each of hers and quieting Holly when she gets too distracted. Anna, the black maid who has worked for the Andersons since before I was born, will be with them. I should be there too. But I am not wanted. I have forfeited my place.
I hate the flatness of this sun-scorched boneyard. I once attended a funeral in Natchez; the burial took place on majestic bluffs high above the Mississippi River, in a white-stoned Athens of a cemetery shaded by moss-draped oaks. That’s how a cemetery should be. A place that can bring a little peace to the living.
Erin’s graveside service is mercifully short. The crowd thins at the edges first, the impatient ones heading for cars they parked away from the cortege in order to facilitate a quick exit. A few people move in my direction, possibly to visit their own dead, but I stand my ground. To hell with them and whatever they think about why I’m not at Drewe’s side.
As larger waves move toward the line of waiting cars, I know that one word is on the lips of everyone. Murder. More evil has probably been spoken of Erin on this day than on any during her life. Whispered rumors of drug addiction and promiscuity recalled in the glare of a sensational crime, savored as the most titillating gossip to touch this town in a decade. Most of the local citizens will have convinced themselves that she brought the murder on herself. The wages of sin, brother, amen. Yet somewhere beneath that summary judgment lies fear. A nameless dread that perhaps this daughter of Rain did nothing to bring her fate upon herself. That some faceless being has for unknown or unknowable reasons chosen this little enclave as his hunting ground. Or perhaps even-God forbid-that he was raised here. I am glad for that fear. They deserve it.
When the muted rumble of engines rolls past me, I focus on the tent that shades Erin’s grave. My line of sight is clear now. The family is there, standing together. A much diminished group of mourners stands a respectful distance apart. Close friends.