The Order of Death

by Hugh Fleetwood

  The other main theme in my books, I suppose, is the ‘beauty and the beast’ element – that you have to have them both, you can’t have one without the other. Beauty without the beast is shallow, meaningless.

  RTK: Would you say it’s a necessary acknowledgement of evil in the world?

  HF: Not ‘evil’, just the facts of life. I don’t really ‘do’ evil (laughs). I hate the word ‘innocent’, too – I know what people mean by it but I just don’t buy it. There’s ignorance and then there’s knowledge, or there should be.

  People say Francis Bacon’s paintings are horrific, but I find them beautiful as paintings. The subject matter is, in a sense, irrelevant. If you consider the power of Renaissance painters who painted crucifixions – the subject may be tragic or whatever you want to call it, but if the paintings are beautiful then in that way you get the whole package. The Grunewald Crucifixion in Colmar, for example, is horrific but also beautiful. Whereas paintings by someone like Renoir who just did flowers and rosy-cheeked girls are much uglier to me.

  RTK: So the artist needs to make an accommodation with the horrific, to look at it squarely?

  HF: Oh, I think everybody should, artists or no. I should say, I don’t think artists are any more corrupt than anyone else – I just think they should stop pretending that they’re less.

  CHAPTER ONE

  He glanced up and down the street, slipped sideways into the news-stand, and looked for the paper that he would pick up and pay for without saying a word; the paper that he picked up and paid for every day, without saying a word. But he couldn’t see it. The Post, yes, and the Daily News. And round the sides of the kiosk The Village Voice, and Screw, and Scum. But not—he felt the beginning of sweat on his neck, under his cashmere scarf. It always made him panic slightly if he had to ask. He wondered if he should go to another news-stand. But then he told himself not to be ridiculous. Today was the day for this news-stand, and he couldn’t, he mustn’t break the rules. As soon as one started breaking even the smallest rule, chaos broke out. That was a fact. He looked round again—there was only a soft looking youth by his side, with lank fair hair, staring dopily at the magazines; no one to worry about, he could tell that at a glance—and then leaned forwards towards the old man behind the stand—who was watching him coolly, no doubt expecting him to be searching for some undisplayed dirty book—and said in his neat, prim voice, ‘The Times.’

  ‘Pardon me?’

  Now he felt real sweat under his scarf, and in the palms of his hands, too. He would have to ask again. But at least, when he looked round once more, he saw that the youth had gone, and he was alone. He said quickly, and more loudly, ‘The New York Times.’

  ‘It’s finished,’ the old man rasped, watching him coolly still.

  He swallowed hard and took a step backwards. He was so angry he would have liked to hit the old man. But he didn’t, of course, and merely let himself be caught up in the tide of people sweeping along the street, and drifted along with it, trembling. Then he slipped his change back into the pocket of his coat, and took a tiny diary and a tinier pencil from his briefcase. That news-stand would have to be struck off his list, he told himself. It was absurd—to be out of the Times by eleven in the morning! And what was more, he couldn’t stand in­solence. Not in anyone. And especially not in old men.

  He opened the diary as he walked, turned to February 9th, and crossed out the neat entry ‘N.Y. Public Library, 42nd St.’ Then he turned to March 9th, and crossed out the same entry. Later, he would pick another news-stand to go to on the ninth day of each month, and write that in.

  Meanwhile, there was today to be taken care of. Grand Central Station was the best bet, he guessed—especially as he was drifting in that direction. There were two or three bookstalls there, and one of them must have the Times. And with so many people about…. He glanced over his shoulder, and crossed the street.

  *

  As soon as he had bought the paper he went into a telephone booth, opened it, looked quickly through it until he saw a head­line that read ‘no new developments in police murders’, then folded it up, put it in his briefcase, and left the phone booth to start the journey home.

  *

  In theory, this journey—from Grand Central Station—involved only one change on the subway. But today, perhaps because the incident in the news-stand had upset him, or perhaps because he felt that there was more menace than usual in the crowds around him, and he had to be particularly careful, he changed twice—and once even had to get off one train and wait on the same platform until the next came in. There hadn’t been enough people on the first train, and those there had been had seemed to look at him more than was necessary or normal; they had been too aware of him….

  And when he arrived at West Seventy-Second Street Station, he waited until all the other passengers who had got off had left the platform before leaving it himself; before going up to face the cold, and the wind, and the brief apprehensive walk along Central Park West.

  *

  He only relaxed and became himself when he had passed through his street door, passed the ‘good morning’ of the door­man, taken the elevator up to the fifth floor, opened his door, and locked it again behind him. Only then could he tell himself that his precautions against not being seen and followed were absurd, and that his daily furtive ritual of buying the New York Times verged on madness. After all, he thought—as he thought every day as he walked, large and confident now, through the huge, warm, empty rooms of his apartment—he was hardly alone in his choice of newspaper, and he was sure no one was following him. What was more, he certainly wasn’t a nervous man at any other time of the day or night. He had faced gunmen and knife-wielding addicts without a moment’s fear, and generally in­spired awe in most people just by looking at them. And so—he gave what he called a smile, and went into his bathroom and began to strip off his cheap suit. He couldn’t explain it. Yet the strange thing was, he thought, that he actually enjoyed that half hour or hour of tension, that feeling of being hunted and helpless and spied on, almost as much as he enjoyed anything in his life. It was like being given a blood-transfusion. He enjoyed the sweat under his scarf—that scarf that was the only piece of expensive clothing he allowed himself to wear outside of this apartment, and always told people, if they asked, which they almost never did, had been a present from his ex-wife—and he enjoyed the smell that he gave off, though he was sure that only he could smell it.

  In fact, the only thing he did enjoy more than the getting to his apartment was the apartment itself, and his being there.

  And now he was there, and he was taking a shower, and when he had finished his shower he would take a white silk shirt that he had had made for him and put it on, and he would put on the grey silk suit that he had had made for him, and the black silk socks, and the crocodile skin shoes, and one of his ten silk ties, and he would look at himself in the mirror; look at his strong enormous body in its fine clothes, at his square reddish face with its short reddish hair and its bright red eyebrows, and at his big red hands. And then he would close his eyes and stand there and, just for a minute, feel quite sick with the joy of being alive.

  Then he would go into the room overlooking the park that would have been, that should have been, and in a way was, the living room, and take a bottle of fine whisky from the cabinet, and pour himself a drink. Then he would sit down in one of the two brown leather armchairs that were, along with the cabinet—and not counting the kitchen—the only pieces of furni­ture in the whole apartment, and would sip his whisky and look at the fresh white walls and the deep greenish brown carpet, and read the New York Times. He would sit there for an hour or two, and then he would get up and take off his fine clothes, and fold them up neatly and put them away. Then he would put on his old cheap clothes again, do some cleaning, and, finally, leave—to go, depending on whether he had come to the apart­ment before going on duty or after coming off, to work, or to the small shabby apartment on the first floor of a shabb
y brown­stone in Brooklyn where he actually lived.

  Every day of the year, barring accidents, he did the same thing, except for the weeks of his vacation; and then he would spend all day at the apartment, and would eat there, and only go back to Brooklyn to sleep.

  Today however, after he had showered and dressed, the per­fection of pleasure that his time in the apartment gave him was marred slightly by the fact that when he went into the kitchen to get a glass for his whisky, he saw crumbs on the sideboard, and what looked like spilt milk on the stove. For a second he felt as angry as he had when the newsvendor had told him that the Times was finished. But then he forced himself to think—since nothing as ugly as anger must be allowed to intrude into this paradise of his—that a few crumbs and a bit of milk were nothing to worry about. So he took off his jacket, put it on a hanger that was behind the kitchen door, undid his gold cuff­-links, rolled up the sleeves of his silk shirt, and, taking a cloth from under the sink, carefully swept up the crumbs, and cleaned the stove. When everything was spotless, he took a sharpened pencil and a piece of paper from a drawer, and wrote, in a small neat hand, a note.

  ‘Bob,

  I guess you were hungry and had a snack and some coffee or something. But you left crumbs on the sideboard and spilt milk on the stove. I guess you were in a hurry, or you would have cleaned up after you. But please do not leave a mess. You know I don’t like mess.

  Fred.’

  He checked the note, approved it—its tone was suitably ignor­ant—and left it in the middle of the sideboard where the crumbs had been. Then he took a pencil sharpener from the drawer, sharpened his pencil over the sink, replaced both sharpener and pencil in the drawer, turned on the waste-disposal unit and cleaned out the sink, dried his hands, rolled down his sleeves and fixed his cuff-links, put on his jacket again, and took the glass he had come into the kitchen to fetch.

  He hoped he wouldn’t have any more trouble with Bob—for a while, at least. And he probably wouldn’t, he thought. In part because Bob, in spite of his condescending attitude towards him, was scared of him, and in part because Bob only rarely came to the apartment now. In fact, ever since he had got married, a year and a half ago, he came less and less—and Fred foresaw a time when he wouldn’t come at all any more. Which would be nice, he reflected. Then this place would be all his, and there would be no danger of finding crumbs in the kitchen—or, as he had done once, hair and scum in one of the bath-tubs. God, he remembered that! It was just over a year ago. He had gone into Bob’s bathroom for some reason, and had never seen anything so filthy—so sacrilegious, he had felt—in his life. Not only had there been scum and hair in the bath-tub, but also tooth-paste in the wash-basin, shit in the toilet bowl, and a damp towel lying on the floor. Bob had protested that it was his bathroom, but that was no excuse. He had exploded, and told him that if any­thing like that ever happened again their partnership would be over; he would buy out Bob’s share of the apartment, or even tell Lenore about their mutual investment.

  And Bob would have done anything rather than let that happen….

  It was because he hated mess, he told himself as he settled into his armchair with his whisky, and started to open out the paper, that he hated the New York Times, and was so ashamed of buying it that he changed news-stands every day in case any­one should get to know him, and pigeon-hole him as a man who read the Times. It was a paper that championed mess and dis­order. He had read once—maybe in the Times itself—that nearly all political upheavals were caused basically not by the invasion of an outside enemy, nor by the discontent of the poor and have-nots, but by the guilt or feeling of guilt of the rich and the haves. And if that was so—and he thought it was—then the Times would be among those most responsible for any up­heaval if it came. Because it was always pleading guilty, or worse, pretending to, or worst of all, encouraging others to do both. In fact, he had often thought that the troubles there had been and were in the city of New York—with blacks, and hood­lums, and addicts—were all caused by the sort of people who read the Times; people who had been so conditioned into feeling guilty that they had invented punishment for themselves; punish­ments that took the form of gangsters and muggers and delin­quents. The only trouble was that everyone else had to share in their punishment too. Which wasn’t fair. If they wanted it, they should get it.

  Still, just because the Times was the enemy newspaper, he felt he should read it as a form of defence; just to know what the enemy was up to. And especially at the present.

  He opened it at the page he had turned to in the telephone booth, and started to read.

  ‘Police Commissioner Barnes said at a press conference today that the police have discovered no new evidence to help them with their investigation into the murder last Tuesday of Detec­tive Jim Parro. Commissioner Barnes did say however that there is no doubt that Officer Parro was the latest victim of the assassin who has now been responsible for the deaths of five City police officers over the last eighteen months; all of whom were attached to the Narcotics Bureau. Detective Parro was found in the hall­way of a building on East Fourth Street. His throat had been cut—as the other four victims throats were cut—with what, Commissioner Barnes said, appears to have been a bread-knife.’

  Poor Jim, Fred thought, stopping reading for a moment and gazing out of the window, where one or two flakes of snow were now aimlessly drifting up and down in the February wind. He wondered if it had hurt. He ran a finger over his own throat, and imagined a bread-knife sawing into that hard, thick skin—that skin that Helen had always said was like the skin of a sow’s back—and shivered. And then, letting his mind wander, he thought of Helen, and wondered why she had always said a sow’s back. Why not a pig’s? He had asked her once, he re­membered, when they were still married. But she had never explained, and always just said ‘because that’s what it’s like’. Helen…. It was four years now since their divorce. Four happy years. Four years of order. Four years of a perfect, secret bliss….

  But then he thought of Jim again, and as he had seen him, lying in that dark brown hallway with his throat grinning and his cheap clothes all stained and dirty with blood; and once more he shivered. At least if he died a violent death he hoped it would be here, in his secret kingdom, and with his fine clothes on. Then, somehow, it wouldn’t be so bad. But he didn’t think he would die a violent death. He wasn’t, surely, the type. No—he would go on working for another ten years or so, and then, with enough money coming in from his carefully invested money, he would retire here, and spend his days tending and nursing his apartment, slowly furnishing it, keeping it clean, looking after it as if it were his child. He would go for a walk every day—across the park and back maybe; from eleven to twelve—and then would come back, make himself some lunch, and spend the afternoons reading his encyclopaedias; article after article, volume after volume, slowly, carefully, taking all that knowledge in, stacking it tidily on the shelves of his mind. And in the evenings he would have his supper and watch the television and read the Wall Street Journal and make sure his stocks were doing all they should be doing. And sometimes, just occasionally, he would go out at night, and wander around—go down to the Village maybe, or to Times Square—and look at all the great sprawling filthy chaos of people, cars, and refuse; look at them just to reassure himself, just to value all the more his isolation, his peace, his order. He would have no friends—he never had had any, unless Bob had once been a friend; but he didn’t think so; his relationship with Bob was just a mistake he bitterly re­gretted—and he would speak to no one, except the store-keepers and a few other people like that. He sighed. How he longed for that time! But then he reminded himself that the minutes were passing, and he still hadn’t finished looking at the Times; so he picked it up again and, once more, started reading.

  When he had finished the piece about Jim’s murder, he went to the front page and worked his way systematically through the paper, reading almost every article, skipping hardly a word, only saving till the l
ast an editorial headed ‘The Dead Policemen’.

  ‘The brutal murders of Detective Parro and his four colleagues raise three equally terrifying suspicions. One, that there is a maniac on the loose who enjoys murdering policemen attached to the Narcotics Bureau. Two, that organized crime has changed its rules and has taken to the attack, rather than, as has always been the case with regard to the police, being on a generally very effective defence, and three, that the five murdered officers were killed by a member—or members—of their own force, who perhaps feared that their investigations into the narcotics scene would uncover more than just a ring of dealers and pushers. And it is this last suspicion that is perhaps the most disquieting. That police corruption exists, always has existed, and probably always will exist is an unfortunate state of affairs that we have had to come, grimly, to accept. But that corruption no longer involves merely the acceptance of bribes, but might also involve the death of any man who is foolhardy enough to refuse to be corrupted, is a new and horrific development; and presage to a state of total anarchy, when no officer will dare to refuse the lucrative offers made to him, for fear that to do so will be to, quite literally, cut his own throat.’

  Fred sipped his whisky and threw the paper down on the floor. He couldn’t be bothered to go on reading. What was the point of wading through all that nonsense, when the editor obviously had no idea what he was talking about. Anarchy! Cor­ruption! They were all such grand, pompous words. How could anyone talk about corruption when drugs were involved? If there was anything on earth guaranteed to keep order, it was drugs and drug-addiction, and if there was anything noble in the world, it was the propagation, by whatever means, of drugs. It was the banning, the illegality of drugs that caused crime, and it was, ultimately, the banning and illegality of drugs that had caused the death of Jim and the others—who hadn’t the sense to see that by fighting drugs they were fighting the very order they sought to uphold. Drugs should be available to all, should be given away to anyone who wanted them. And then all the trash and rotten elements of society would be under control, would behave themselves and do as they were told—and do as they were told by the strong; by those who had no need of drugs. Oh yes—all the great civilizations of the past had been slave societies, and this society, this America, would not only be greater and stronger than any of the civilizations of the past if it realized this, but would also last longer, far longer, if not forever. As it was, it was corrupted and ruled by the weak, who were worm­ing away at the foundations, and being encouraged in their destructiveness by the pillars of bad conscience and the spokes­men of guilt such as the writers and readers of papers like the New York Times. It was the weak who were the true corrupters! And the beauty of a society in which drugs were freely available, would be that the slaves of this society would be voluntary slaves; not slaves who had been captured and branded and forced into slavery. And they would be slaves who could, at any moment, if they were strong enough, stop being slaves; could, with an effort of will, join the ranks of the strong. Perhaps the only people on whom drugs should be forced would be those few people found guilty of crimes committed when they were not on drugs. But these would be so few they would be negligible. And as soon as they were addicted they would be able to be released from prison—six months would be the longest sentence necessary for anyone—and could become members of the great, law-abiding army of the weak, whose punishment, whose terrible punishment, if they ever broke the law, would be the immediate withdrawal of their precious, life-giving powder. But drugged criminals would be even fewer than the undrugged ones; after all, they would be given food, clothing, and shelter—and what else would they need, apart from their daily, or hourly shot? Of course it would be necessary to find the best drug for each person, just in case certain drugs incited certain subjects to violence, but that would be easy enough.