The Order of Death

by Hugh Fleetwood

  The old woman led Fred through this maze of abandoned furniture as if she were blind, and had learned her way around by heart, and sat him down on a high, wooden-backed sofa whose hard seat was covered with some tattered fabric and smelled, vaguely, of cat pee. Then she said, ‘Just a moment please.’

  She threaded her way back out of the room and closed the door behind her, leaving Fred to study the furniture further, and to look out through the blocked windows into a big garden that was as ordered and neat and well laid out as the living room was not. He also had time to wonder if the other maid, who was presumably younger, worked in the afternoon—and to hope not. It would be easier for him if he could be in Leo’s room alone, without having any curious servant peering over his shoulder to see what he was doing, and to think it odd that he should pull out the drawers of the vanished boy’s desk.

  He was alone for about five minutes, and was anxiously watch­ing the closed door through which the old woman had gone, and wishing that her employer would come soon, so he could do what he had to do and get out, when he heard another door, behind him, open.

  He got, instinctively, to his feet, and turned to greet Leo Smith’s grandmother. What he saw, however, was not, as he had imagined, some grand old New England dame (New England in spite of her Austrian birth) advancing across the room to welcome him, but the same old lady who had let him in the door, smiling now even more twistedly, but as if, at last, Fred could share in the joke.

  ‘Officer,’ she said, ‘how nice to see you. Please sit down. I’m so sorry to have kept you waiting.’ She sounded, Fred thought first, like one of those old eternal refugees who peopled the streets of New York; and then he thought that the old woman had a strange sense of humour. Sure, he had thought she was a servant, and had possibly spoken to her as if he thought she was; but then it was equally possible that he hadn’t, and that she simply enjoyed playing her own maid—or confusing her visitors. However, he told himself, there was nothing to be gained by feeling annoyed, or by letting the joke antagonize him—so he shook hands with her as if absolutely nothing unusual had oc­curred, and as if he were meeting her for the first time. He said, ‘I’m sorry to have to disturb you. You must be sick of the police and reporters by now.’

  Marguerite Archell Smith raised her old eyebrows, and said, ‘Yes? Must I?’ Then she pulled a face, smiled—very pleasantly—and murmured gently, ‘Oh no. I love to meet new people. Who­ever they are. I’m just sorry I have to meet you in here. But I’m having my living room repainted.’

  Fred smiled, and said, ‘Ah, I guessed maybe you were.’

  ‘I’m not,’ the old lady said, chuckling. ‘I was lying to you. This is my living room.’ She put her hand on Fred’s arm and lowered herself on to the sofa beside him. ‘You must forgive me. I’m a wicked old woman. But I can never resist telling people what they want to hear. And I always—or nearly always —know. But then I get ashamed of myself, because it’s really rather a cruel trick to play. Do forgive me.’

  Fred smiled again—but rather more doubtfully this time. He wasn’t sure how to get on to the subject of Leo with this strange old creature.

  While he was wondering, however, the old creature got on to the subject herself. ‘So,’ she said, sounding serious at last, ‘there’s no more news about Leo.’

  ‘No ma’am,’ Fred said. He cleared his throat. ‘But I would like it if you could tell me again about Leo’s habits.’ He cleared his throat once more.

  ‘Everything?’

  ‘Yes ma’am. You never know, you might have forgotten some­thing the first time. Some little thing that might give us a clue as to where Leo’s got to.’

  ‘I forgot nothing,’ Marguerite Archell Smith said, ‘but I don’t mind repeating myself.’ She wrinkled up her old, smudged nose. ‘Leo’s silly. He’s a weak-minded boy who’s had a good education, which is always a dangerous thing for people with weak minds. He’ll probably end up as president.’ She chuckled again at her own wit, and scratched one of her thick brown woollen knees. ‘Or perhaps I should say he’s giddy, rather than silly. Because at times he’s very sweet, and almost bright. Anyway, I like having him about.’ She said it decisively, as if that settled that. Then she pulled a pack of cigarettes from the sleeve of her sweater, offered one to Fred, took one herself, lit it carefully as if it were likely to explode in her face, and went on, ‘he’s a masochist’. She glanced slyly at Fred now, clearly hoping she had shocked him with her bald announcement. She had, too; she said it in such a matter-of-fact way, as if being a masochist were no more unusual or interesting than being a person with two legs. ‘He likes to have pain inflicted on him. He likes to be mistreated, and beaten, and—well, I think you know what a masochist is, Lieutenant. That’s Leo’s only habit, and that’s why I’m worried that something’s happened to him. I’m afraid that he met some­one in New York who might have gratified his desires, shall we say, too completely. But I know nothing about his life when he goes to New York, and nothing about his friends, if he has any—which I’m not sure about. I hate to interfere in anyone’s life—unless it’s unavoidable. I called the police because I thought it was now.’

  Trying to sound business-like, though now Fred felt almost disgusted by the old lady’s acceptance of her grandson’s perver­sion, he said, ‘Weren’t you worried that he might get hurt. I mean—before now?’

  ‘Of course I was. But I’d only have made it worse if I’d disapproved, or pretended to know nothing. I thought by talking to Leo about it, and treating it as if it were something entirely natural—which I suppose it is, even if it’s not very pleasant—I’d help him to get over it, make him see how silly he was being. He even showed me some photographs he had. They were hor­rible…. But the thing that made me hope that by talking about it openly it might pass, was that Leo’s masochism wasn’t just a physical thing. If it had been, I’d have thought that the only thing to do would be persuade him to go to a psychiatrist, much as I disapprove of psychiatrists. But as it was, Leo had a whole lot of pseudo-philosophical mumbo-jumbo with which he tried to justify his sexual tastes, and which might, just, have been responsible for his starting to put his fantasies into practice.’ She puffed smoke out into the air, laid her hand on Fred’s arm again, and leaned towards him. ‘I think it is always difficult to know whether our fears and desires shape our moral choices, Lieutenant, or whether our moral choices shape our fears and desires. I prefer to think the latter, otherwise there is really no hope for the human race. But I’m always afraid it’s the former. Anyway—’ she sighed now, and released Fred’s arm, ‘Leo had this idea that only through pain can we really become conscious of ourselves and the world. He said it was as if he were going into hell to face the monsters, rather than be continually pre­tending that the monsters didn’t exist, and being at their mercy when and if they did suddenly spring out of the darkness and attack him—and also that all the money he was going to inherit was damned money, money earned out of other people’s suffer­ing and misery, and he, somehow, had to atone for all that.’ She smiled, sadly. ‘I did try to tell him that the monsters in his hell were just imaginary, and there was no great merit in facing up to something he only imagined, and what’s more, he wasn’t responsible for his grandfather’s and great-grandfather’s wicked­ness—though I’m prepared to admit that both my husband and his father were wicked. I told him that one could no more be damned by the sins of one’s ancestors than one could be saved by their virtues. But he wouldn’t believe me.’ She turned right round to face Fred. ‘You must meet a lot of this in your work Lieutenant. Why are people so willing and eager to be guilty?’

  ‘I don’t know ma’am,’ Fred said softly, not wanting to inter­rupt the old lady’s slow, gentle, accented speech, which he was rather enjoying.

  But she had finished her speech, it seemed. She took a deep drag on her cigarette, and said, ‘Anyway, as I said, I failed.’ Then she gave a dry little laugh, and added, ‘The really painful thing for me about it all—I mean apar
t from his disappearance now—is that he was started on all this a few years ago by a series of really dreadful, trite articles in some magazine by some dread­ful, trite woman, who wrote about the police, and had some half-baked notions—among others—that the police were not so much the guardians and preservers of our safety, as the guardians and preservers of our danger—the manifestations of our desire for chaos, rather than the manifestations of our desire for order.’ Marguerite Archell Smith snorted. ‘It was something like that. I can’t remember exactly. But it was all mostly potted Freud—the police satisfying our longing for guilt, and inspiring us to commit crimes just so we can be punished for them. I’m not saying that some of it might not be true in some way, but the basic idea was that the police were all wretches whom we’d be better off without, even if the woman who wrote the articles was much too sharp to ever come out into the open and say such a damn fool thing. What so many of these liberals would like is some mixture of self condemnation and self punishment, and college educated lynching parties.’ She gave an old Austrian laugh. ‘I’m a liberal myself. Did you ever see those articles, Lieutenant?’

  ‘No,’ Fred said; not wanting to seem surprised by this coin­cidence—he wasn’t; it seemed entirely natural to him, and quite inevitable—nor wanting to tell Leo Smith’s grandmother that not only had he read them, and knew the girl who had written them, but that he himself had been intended as material for those articles….

  ‘Do you remember the woman’s name? The one who wrote the articles?’

  ‘No. Besides, Leo wrote her a couple of letters, asking her about some points she had made, but he never got a reply. So she wouldn’t know anything about him. But it was really with those articles that the trouble began. Leo got this obsession with the police, and was always threatening to go and confess to any crimes he read about in the paper. Once, about two years ago, he actually did. A girl was raped and murdered here, and Leo rushed off and told the police that he had done it. Luckily the captain knew me, and phoned me, and I went and sorted it all out.’

  ‘Did,’ Fred asked slowly, ‘Leo do it?’

  Marguerite Archell Smith gave another old laugh, and said, ‘You’re smart, Mr.—?’

  ‘Franklin.’

  ‘Mr. Franklin. No. Leo didn’t do it. But I’m afraid that one day he might confess to something his old grandmother with her cursed millions won’t be around to help him out of.’

  ‘You don’t think he’s confessed to something now, and is being held somewhere—under another name?’

  It was, he realized, as soon as he had said it, a mistake; and the old lady realized it too. She said, ‘I was hoping you would be able to tell me that Mr. Franklin. Your colleagues, yesterday, said that his photograph was being sent round the country.’

  ‘Yes,’ Fred mumbled, trying to get out of it. ‘But I wondered whether you thought that’s what’s happened?’

  ‘I don’t know. But it is possible. That’s one of the reasons I asked for your help.’ She sounded, now, slightly annoyed.

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Fred cleared his throat—and changed the subject. ‘You said that Leo had some photographs. You don’t know if he still has them, do you? It might be useful if we could identify some of the people in those photographs—if they’re not only of Leo.’

  ‘No. They were not only of Leo,’ the old lady murmured. ‘But I also told your colleagues yesterday that I haven’t seen them for years, and Leo told me that he had destroyed them.’

  Was she beginning to get suspicious, Fred wondered. He tried, with a laugh, to smooth things over. ‘I guess you think we’re not very well co-ordinated.’

  ‘No. I wasn’t thinking that at all. I am truly grateful for any help you can give me, and if to help you help me I have to repeat myself—I told you, I don’t mind.’

  She sounded, Fred thought, sincere. He said—coming, at last, to the point—‘Well do you think you could help me more by letting me take a look at Leo’s room?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ the old lady said, starting to rise slowly. ‘I did look myself of course, but it is possible I overlooked some­thing. I was,’ she added, ‘quite surprised your colleagues yester­day didn’t want to poke around.’

  It was as easy as that.

  *

  The notebook, as Leo Smith had said, was behind the drawer in his desk. Fred opened the first page, read the words, ‘I am the cop-killer’, and put the book in his pocket. Then he sat on a red silk-covered bed for ten minutes, looking around the charac­terless, paintingless, room—that had only the bed, the desk, a brown rug and a wooden chair as furniture—before going down­stairs to tell the boy’s grandmother that he had found nothing.

  *

  As Fred was leaving the house he said, ‘Do you mind if I ask you a personal question Mrs. Smith?’

  ‘Oh, you can ask me anything, Mr. Franklin,’ the old lady muttered—sarcastically?

  ‘Why,’ Fred said, ‘did a nice lady like you marry a man who you knew was wicked?’

  Marguerite Archell Smith laughed. ‘You are smart, Mr. Frank­lin. But the truth of the matter is—I didn’t know that my husband was wicked when I married him. He was quite a bit older than me, and belonged to a different world. And when I did find out—he was killed in an accident.’ She gave Fred a last, twisted, private smile. ‘I was lucky,’ she said, ‘wasn’t I?’

  *

  On the train back to New York he read Leo’s notebook. It was in three parts. The first consisted of a detailed account of how the boy had killed the six policemen; complete with time, place, method of selection and pursuit, mode of attack, and death agonies—although the last one was rather sketchy, and had ob­viously been written up in a hurry. There were also photographs, cut from the papers, and summaries of the murdered men’s families.

  The second part of the notebook consisted of a number of short—very short—pornographie stories, or rather fantasies, all of them—though Fred didn’t read them, and merely glanced disgustedly through them—of the most repulsive nature. They were told in the first person, and consisted mainly of how the narrator—Leo Smith—was beaten, humiliated, tortured, and—frequently—murdered. At the end of the last story, after the narrator had described how—and with what sensations—he had had his finger nails ripped from his hands, his eyes gouged out, his genitals sawn off, and had, finally, been impaled on a red hot iron spike, there was written, by way of a postscript: ‘This is my theatre and my reality; this is my art and my life. I have been to the centre of the earth, and flown to the edge of space—into the total darkness where the hardest diamond melts like snow on a summer’s day, and into the regions where time curves. I have been where no one else has ever been, and I have borne what no one else has ever borne. I have been the Sahara, rained on by the dark clouds of knowledge, and I have absorbed every drop—and I have been the ice-caps of the poles, dissolved by the warm currents of consciousness. I have been everything, I have done everything, I have known everything. I have lived.’

  The third part of the notebook was, for Fred, the most interest­ing. It read:

  February 29th. I have found him. I am absolutely certain. And he is exactly as I hoped he would be. A great red sow of a man. (A sow, yes, not a pig; there is something gentle, almost maternal about the way he walks and moves, in spite of his size, and in spite of the fact that there is nothing soft about him. It is as if there were small invisible piglets surrounding him that he is scared of treading on, or small invisible piglets feeding on him that he is scared of disturbing.) I knew, as soon as I saw him, that he was my man. I followed him for a while, and then I lost him. It was almost as if he knew he were being followed, and were trying to lose me—which is very unlikely. But the fact that I did lose him only makes me more sure of my choice. Tomorrow, or the day after, I will find him again.

  March 2nd. I have, as I knew I would, found him again. And once again he tried to lose me. But this time I was more careful. I followed him all over town. He went up to West 104th Street
to buy a newspaper, and then went—by way of Second Avenue and East Twenty-Third Street!—to an apartment house on Central Park West. #88.

  March 10th. His name is Frank O’Connor.

  March 11th. He is called Fred, and is a Lieutenant.

  March 18th. He lives in a run down brownstone on Prospect Park West. (Central Park West—Prospect Park West—any connection?)

  March 26th. I have followed him every day for the last six days. Everything about him is beyond my wildest dreams.

  April 8th. Five days up here in Providence. I wonder how Fred is doing. I can’t wait to get back to N.Y. to see.

  April 9th. I would like to introduce Fred to Grandmother. I’m sure she’d love him!

  June 12th. I feel I’m ready—but I must be patient. There must be no mistakes. I think perhaps this winter sometime. I would prefer it if I could get a look at the apartment on C.P.W. one day, when he’s out—but it’s too risky.

  June 26th. How much can one know about another human being just by watching, following, listening? Everything, I think—far more, anyway, than by talking to someone, which tends to confuse one. We put up so many smoke screens. But I won’t be certain until—

  July 19th. Fred is on vacation. Bless him. I knew he wouldn’t go away.

  September 22nd. He looked right at me today. I was afraid he’d seen me. But he was looking through me. Searching for the dark horseman, I guess. Or checking on his invisible piglets. Certainly he would never suspect me.

  September 23rd. He looked through me again today. Is it possible, I wonder, that subconsciously he does know I am following him, and is happy about it? Which is why he never sees me when he looks at me. The idea is quite exciting. If it’s true, I guess we could keep this up forever. Or until I get bored. And then I’ll make him see me.

  December 1st. Quite soon now. Next week I’d better fix a date, otherwise I might keep putting it off and putting it off. (Which makes me suspect that just as Fred must subcon­sciously know I’m following him, so I, subconsciously, might be afraid of him, and of going through with my plan. If so—no! If so nothing. Fuck my subconscious.)