Shudder (23 page)

For now she was still very alert and open to any kind of information conveyed on any level.

She knew that Anton was still shaking in his shoes from what he had brought upon her.

He was probably terrified it could go wrong
, she thought
, terrified that he could cause some irreversible damage to his little girl
.

Again, a tear rolled down her right cheek, but this was not a tear of fear or of pain. “It's all right, Dad, it's all right,” she said softly, leaning over the table and cupping his tired face in her delicate small hands. “Thank you. Thank you for everything.”

In the corner of the mess hall, in partial shadow, by a square wooden column, Mister Guerrero watched Anton and Natalie hug each other tearfully and ate his peanuts with relish. His massive chest heaved rhythmically and his full lips were crooked in a content smile.

Although not quite sure what was going on, he had always been a sucker for family melodrama, and knew one when he saw one.

He also felt sincere sympathy for both Anton and Natalie and even brushed away some little tears of his own.

David lay on his sofa, body loose, relaxed, but his eyes twitching, as if following movements on some invisible screen. His jaw was tense and there was a slight droop to his mouth. The detective was deep in thought.

The killer—no longer ‘the shit strangler' but simply Joshua.

What turns a young man like that into a killer? With a Daddy like his Daddy, he could have everything. So, why would he be going around killing women? And in this fashion at that.

After all, he's not some kind of loser with no money, position or looks. It's not like he's been watching all the females around him for years with the bitter hunger of he who knows he can only ever watch.

Then why?

Just for thrills? There are many other things one can do for thrills. Perhaps he was just fucked in the head. Maybe he thought God told him to do this. Or Satan. Or the aliens.

Maybe he just hears voices
, Dave thought and immediately frowned in self-refutation. Even if he was a loony, surely Daddy would have found the best doctors for him by now.

Unless Joshua was sane enough to hide his madness.

“That doesn't make sense,” Dave said aloud. “No
senso, segnoro
.”

He turned away from the world in disappointment and stared at the back of the sofa, now five inches away from his eyes. Its red upholstery was bisected by tiny groves, in which little fluffs of dust had collected.

Dave looked at them but did not see them. He remembered again the similarities between his and the killer's tastes in women. Again he felt the desire to throw up stirring at the mere thought, but instead he clenched his fists and controlled his breathing. He had to follow any train of thought which allowed him to figure out what makes this junior Eysenck tick.

He reviewed his recent conquests.

That's it.

He opened his eyes, suddenly alert.

Conquests.

Yes, this was not just a cliché word, suddenly it was a very fitting description for his intimate habits. He ‘conquered'. He liked the thrill of conquest. Of the woman ceding territory.

This had been his kick since way back when he was still a teenager. Especially when he was still a teenager. Before things got too easy. Before someone repealed most of the rules of the complicated game of slowly expanding the area of the female body which could be touched.

At first, very few parts are acceptable to touch. Shoulders, forearms, the calves, sometimes the belly. Then your hands go towards the breasts, or the thighs, or the ass. She squirms, she shrugs you off, she shows that you are transgressing. Slowly your hands return to the ‘allowed' places and slowly start expanding them.

Inch by inch, minute by minute she gets used to your hands, to your presence on the ever shifting topography of her body and soon you are at the base of a breast, or the beginning of the curve of the ass.

Only bumbling fools jump straight ahead at this point. No, the connoisseur, he waits, he lingers at the edges between the two zones, softly, little by little he lets the girl adapt to the shifting balance of ‘allowed—not allowed', and then and only then he makes his move.

Dave snorted, stood up, and found his notebook on the table. He scribbled the words “Act of conquest” on the paper, and as an afterthought added a number: “1”. He was certain more things would be coming out now. He felt his brain whirring.

After having passed the threshold of anxiety and nausea he suddenly felt his thoughts like laser beams, or even like laser scalpels, dissecting into its basic components everything on which they were turned.

The detective rubbed his temples.
Right, so he liked the idea of conquest. Did the killer like that too? Almost certainly. What else?

Dave lay down again on the sofa. A dozen half-formed thoughts crawled around the periphery of his attention. He let them crawl.

Dave felt that now, after he had given the main direction of where the mind should go, he should stand back and let the cogs beneath the surface do their work, churn away without being hindered by a blundering foreman, by his conscious interference.

He stared at the ceiling. There was a very thin crack going from the north wall to the chandelier. A sentence floated into his head: “She surrendered herself to his animal magnetism.”

Where had he read that? Probably in some trashy novel as a boy.

Surrender.

Yes, that was the second thing. After the joy of the act of conquest, the joy of seeing the woman finally surrender.

He jumped up again and wrote down: “2—The act of surrender.”

This feeling, when the woman visibly takes the decision to submit to your desire, and she either turns into a warm mannequin which you use like a toy, or she enthusiastically answers your every move and even tries to anticipate your wishes and ideas.

Dave realized that his right hand was inside his pants, holding a rapidly growing penis. He scowled and tried to concentrate. What else is there? The sexual act itself, of course.

The climax.

The proof of manhood.

The proof of worthiness.

Dave got up and wrote: “He is trying to prove something with all this. What?”

He sat down on the chair at the table and focused. His fingers caressed the wooden surface of the table. There was no tablecloth of course. He didn't bother with such things. Consequently the table was covered by overlapping brown circles left by countless coffee mugs and by other more obscure remains of dinners past. An archipelago of hardened crumbs lay at the left edge. A few tiny sugar crystals had mingled with them.

Dave underlined the ‘what?' with his pen, and then underlined it again. What was the bastard trying to prove? That he can control women? Fine, that's not a crime in itself.

Anyway, many women desperately need to prove to themselves that there is someone out there who wants to control them. Someone, who cares enough about them to dominate them.

Why kill them? Why not just pretend?

Dave pushed away at the table and got up shakily. Inadvertently, he had opened the gates for a terrible realization to dawn on him. He swallowed nonexistent saliva and looked around for a half-finished glass of water with which it was his habit to litter his apartment.

There were two of them by the fridge, near the new kettle. One was less grimy and the water inside was not quite cloudy with dust.

He drained it.

His scalp and right cheek felt very tender.

When he himself sometimes choked a girl playfully, he was acting out in a game an impulse, which was at its root the same as the impulses of the killers. Only the killers really did it, while he was happy to deal with a pretend version of events.

* * * *

After about twenty minutes of lying in his bed with the blanket pulled over his head he was ready to take his chances at facing the world again.

Cautiously he peered out from under the blanket.

Does everyone have these impulses inside themselves?
he wondered.
Is that why drunk husbands beat their wives? Is the deep impulse inside them the same as the one that makes killers kill women and open-minded dudes to pretend to kill them?

He grappled to find some sort of balance. Some firm point on which to stand while dealing with all these unwelcome thoughts. Instead, he remembered the feeling of supremacy he had felt when Georgette had squirmed below him. It was as if he had controlled her every move. What an intense power trip!

Poor Georgette.

Suddenly he smiled. A silly image of a country gentleman on horseback, participating in a fox hunt, appeared in his mind.

Perhaps in a way they knew all this even back then. Perhaps they felt what they wanted deep down, and they just spread it out.

They controlled a living being: a horse.

They killed a living being: a fox. They even gang-killed it, if we count the dogs.

They fucked prostitutes like sex slaves and for their wives they saved the romantic kisses and all the minute gestures of respect.

Dave felt the unpleasant pressure on the back of his head grow. He was on the verge of a tension headache. This was getting him nowhere. He was just finding out things about himself which he didn't want to find out.

Perhaps Anton would have been able to help, but he was in the province with Natalie.

Natalie.
Dave quickly pushed the image of a naked Natalie in riding boots away from his thoughts and switched on the TV. After clicking through a number of reality shows and dancing clips he again took refuge in his old flicks.

Realizing that right now he needed something deliberately naive and undemanding, he stopped on early 21st century
Doctor Who
.

With a smile of relief, he sunk into his sofa as he heard the familiar melody at the beginning.
Oo-ee-wooo, eeee—wooo...

A thin chap with sideburns and a speed freak attitude popped out of a telephone booth and proceeded to run around, waving his magic screwdriver at various aliens.

Within twenty minutes, Dave became uneasy again. Even the Doctor was not good enough, not asexual enough.

There were far too many pale, full-bosomed MILFS in leather jackets darting to and fro. Moreover, an abundance of black girls in uniforms giving and carrying out orders.

Suddenly the image of Natalie in uniform appeared in his imagination. This time he didn't shoo the thought away.

Instead, guiltily, he allowed himself to slip into a memory-wank, reliving the sensual moments he had with Natalie years ago.

After that, he fell asleep.

Natalie woke up from the sun beam which tickled her nostrils and eyelashes. It was falling through the room's window, through the parting in the two embroidered curtains, highlighting the slowly floating dust particles in the way which infallibly brings a general feeling of childish wellbeing.

She let out a contented sigh and turned her gaze to the wooden ceiling for a minute. It was the same as it was in her childhood, even the small tacky gilded chandelier, even the shapes made of the wood knots in the planks.

Many a time, years ago, she would look at these shapes with sleepy eyes, until they would begin transforming into various magical characters.

She saw a small moving string at one corner of the ceiling. Ants. Taking refuge from the cold outside, probably amidst preparations for the winter sleep. If they
had
winter sleep indoors.

Natalie rolled over on her stomach and looked at the wooden floor. It was covered by a thick Indian rug, among the strands of which lived the carpet people of her childhood.

She stretched a lazy arm and maneuvered her slippers into place. Then she sat up and gave a hearty yawn.

After breakfast with Anton they went for a walk in the nearby woods. This was the last day in nature, in the afternoon they would drive back to the city and the next morning both would be back in their offices.

Needle pines shuffled softly beneath their shoes as they walked and talked.

Anton's furtive inquisitive glances had stopped since breakfast and he was now his normal laid back, amiable, cynical self. Apparently he was satisfied that his little girl really had passed through the eye of the needle successfully, ready to go back to her everyday life without the threat of immediate relapse.

After twenty minutes, by common mute consent they sat on the cool, coarse, moist grass, on a small clearing at the cut off edge of something between a small hill and a big mound, and smoked cigarettes, their hair moving with the gentle breeze.

“I really feel uncertain about my job now,” Natalie said after a while.

Anton threw her a brief glance, to show that he was listening, and returned to gazing at the moving sea of trees below them.

“What, you mean the sociology?”

“That too, but I actually meant about working for the National Patriots.”

“What's wrong with that?” Anton asked with a ghost of a mischievous grin.

“You know very well what's wrong, Dad. They are a bunch of Nazis. Or rather—” Natalie dragged at her cigarette for the last time and mashed it with a few precise movements into the grass near her, “or rather they are not anything, but they play on the desire of a portion of the masses to vote for Nazis. With a human face, of course,” she added with a soft touch of distaste.

“Well, daughter of mine,” Anton said, “as you say, there's a market for such a party, and such a party appeared. You can't make the demand for Nazi politicians disappear. Perhaps, by knowing that they are represented politically, the more psychotic elements of the masses will not feel that they are forced to make terrorist organizations or patriotic militias.”

Natalie looked at her father and, as usual, could not be certain if he was serious or was being subtly sarcastic while implying the opposite of what he was saying.

“You really think that?” she asked finally.

Anton sighed and faced his daughter. He felt in her voice that for her the object of the conversation was not a trifle. She needed advice, but she also needed comfort.

She was therefore in need of comforting advice. He, as her father, had to give it with all seriousness, but very carefully.

He had to word his comforting advice in ways in which he would not make her feel intense bad emotions, but would also not be going against his own moral convictions.

He couldn't afford to sound phony.

“Natalie,” he began, “I'll tell you what I think about the whole issue, and then I'll tell you what I think about your role in it.”

Natalie nodded in agreement. She opened her small flat pack of feminine cigarettes and then noticed her actions and stopped. She wasn't a chain-smoker after all.

However, Anton was, and without any inhibitions he lit the next one. “What is democracy? How does it work?” he asked.

“One man, one vote,” Natalie replied, “one person, one vote I mean.”

Anton laughed a sarcastic laugh, “North Korea had one man one vote. Hitler's Germany did. That's no criteria. Let me rephrase myself. What is the basis of the western concept of political liberty?” He quickly proceeded to answer in case Natalie decided that this was a real question. “Liberty of the western type hinges on a system of checks and balances. It's an artificial structure, the aim of which is to never allow one player to have all of the power. Right?”

“Right. The courts being independent from the politicians in power, etc.”

“Exactly. Not that we have that anymore, but at least we still have a multiparty system. Now, the epistemological weakness of pro-democracy conservatives and market liberals, starting with the eighteenth century…”

Anton stopped and looked at Natalie. She knew that he was waiting for a confirmation that she was following him, and nodded.

“Is that they insist on describing democracy, equal rights and a free market, as the natural state of humanity. For some reason, probably as momentum from the religious strata in their psyches, they absolutely cannot allow themselves to admit that they are defending something unnatural.

“Yet, just because something is unnatural, it doesn't necessarily follow that it's evil. Nothing is natural in our lives anyway. Living naked in small groups, killing zebras with clubs and eating them raw—this is natural. No, wait, even the clubs are unnatural.”

Anton tugged at the grass by his right foot. Natalie turned slightly, as to look at the moving branches of the trees, but for all that was obviously focused on following her Dad's thoughts.

“Anyway,” Anton said, “my point is—that the natural, or, the less unnatural state of politics, read this as power relations, is that sooner or later only the strongest player remains. He fills up the whole territory. One strong leader and his circle of trusted ones. If he can swing it, he establishes a dynasty.

“This goes for the market as well. The natural process is also for a monopolist to take over. This is why small businesses have been surviving for the last decades only thanks to various anti-monopolist laws.”

“What does that have to do with me working for the National Patriots?” Natalie inquired, without taking her eyes off from the view.

“Wait, wait,” the albino said. “You know I always like to establish a theoretical context.”

“Fine.” Natalie gave him a smile. “Go ahead.”

Anton went ahead, “So, on one hand they say they believe the natural state of the market is many small businesses competing. On the other hand, they know quite well they have to have laws, without which the monopolies take over everything immediately.”

“Okay.”

“The same goes for democracy. It may be a ‘natural state', but left to their own devices, all nations end up with mafia oligarchy or an iron fist leader. Thus, to maintain something like a democracy, there also must be a lack of monopoly.”

“A lack of political monopoly.”

“Yes, exactly. Checks and balances. Weights and counterweights. From this point of view, it doesn't matter much which ones are the ‘goodies', and which ones are the ‘baddies', as long as no one has a complete monopoly of power.

“As long as there are lots of factions feuding with each other, making each other weaker, no one takes the whole field over, and we the people have some breathing space to go on with our lives. We can even influence the behavior of these factions, because they are weak enough to be influenced by us. As soon as even the best possible party or faction consolidates its power over the whole nation, we all spiral down to hell.”

The gist of Anton's tirade dawned on Natalie, “I see, so you mean that as long as the National Patriots are a minor player, and they cancel out to some extent the other political players, democracy is maintained.”

“Yes, in a way,” Anton said glibly, “up to a point. So to say.”

“Well? What's the catch?”

“The catch is, that the masses take their cues of how to behave politically from their politicians. If politicians speak politely, the masses know that it's legitimate to speak politely. If the politicians start speaking impolitely, the masses know that it's legitimate to speak impolitely. If politicians speak about throwing immigrants out and saving the nation and bombing Yemen, then the masses know that it's legitimate to talk about throwing immigrants out and saving the nation and bombing Yemen.”

“Wait Dad, as a sociologist and a PR expert, ahem, I have to tell you that almost everything the politicians say is based on what the people want to hear.”

“Ah.” Anton held up a nicotine stained forefinger. “It's a closed circle. The politicians condition the populace to certain topics and buzz-words and then the masses begin to expect these topics and buzz-words, and when any player introduces something slightly new, everyone starts imitating him as not to be out of step with the times.”

“Could be,” almost agreed Natalie, “but you were talking about the language the politicians use.”

“Right. So, on one hand, even if the Nazis you work for enter parliament, that's no great loss, because another weight has been added into the system of weights and counterweights. If they bluntly introduce their Nazi agenda to the people, this will a) Make it legitimate for people to talk and behave like Nazis, and b) Will force the other dumb motherfuckers in parliament to copy them, because they will think that this is a new trend, and will not want to be left behind.”

“So, what do you think I should do, Dad?”

Anton put out his cigarette near three other twisted little stubs. “I think, dear daughter, that you must do your best to control the public speaking of your clients, in order to maintain a minimum of hygiene in our national politics, and that you and you only can succeed in that.”

“So, the fate of civilization as we know it is in my hands,” Natalie said with a grin and stood up. In spite of her dismissive attitude, Anton knew that he had succeeded.

He managed to give her the comforting advice she needed, and now she would be able to live her life and do her job without hating herself.

To live otherwise for an intelligent woman like her would mean building up unresolved and ignored tension until it boiled over, and brought about another crisis.

A superficial sellout is no good for perceptive people, only a deeply thought through sellout can do the trick.

Anton also stood up and inhaled the fresh air. Tiny needle-pricks attacked his chest, but this was the typical smoker's pain he had come to terms with years ago.

Natalie was standing nearby, also taking in the gently moving surroundings.

Soon it would be time to return to the Ortega, have a hearty lunch, and pack.