The Complete Stories (76 page)

Besides, if the man were identified at last as the one and only prowler, his crimes too would be identified—the real ones—and the rest would be revealed as fantasy, crimes of the mind. Rumours would immediately fly about that he wasn't the real prowler at all but a scapegoat, and that the real prowler was still loose. Women would refuse to recognise him. “No.
My
attacker was quite different. Taller. More brutal looking. It's not him at all.” The police would be accused of a cover-up of their own inefficiency. And sure enough, the attacks would immediately resume. If the prowler ceased to exist we would have to
re-invent him. Perhaps he has already been re-invented several times over.

The police, of course, are well aware of the difficulty. They have to catch the prowler but also to put a stop to the assaults. The first is still a possibility, the second is not. “You can arrest a prowler, but how do you arrest an epidemic?”

This little joke is attributed to Senior Detective Pierce; who also, it seems, has a sense of humour.

And what are his thoughts, the prowler, when eavesdropping in the supermarket on the endless speculations about his identity, or consulting the headlines in McAllister's newsagency to discover where it was precisely, in the maze of suburban streets, that he made his appearance the night before, waiting—perhaps for the newspaper to confirm that he was there after all and to provide details he failed to collect in the confusion of the event itself—the woman's age, whether or not she was married, the number of her children—what does he think when, searching the pages for a full account (for public interest has waned, he has been relegated to page seven), he finds that assaults he never committed are now being attributed to him and others that he did commit have been distorted out of all recognition, either by the woman's account of his activities or the newspaper's reporting of them? Has he begun to realise that the real acts have long since been stolen from him, that events to which he brought his whole body and a lifetime of passionate fantasy have passed out of his hands into the public imagination and been stripped there of all the details that made them significant (for the attraction of the ritual lay in a secret order that made no sense to others), decked out instead with journalistic clichs and given a spurious shape that reflects only the moralism of our newspapers, their preference for the monstrous, and their dependence on the rhetoric of romantic novels, television serials, and softcore pornography? He has become a victim of the newspaper's hunger for events, but only for those events it has already created in its own dream-factory How could he ever break through and make them report one of his crimes as he sees it, as it really is? Meanwhile he feels used, manipulated. In his passage across strange gardens, through strange rooms and the bodies of unnamed
women, he is no longer pursuing his own will, or even his own fantasies, but acting out a scenario whose lines have already been determined by the newspaper and its readers and will be fully revealed to him, the actor, only in the dirty black-and-white of a few paragraphs of print.

Does he long now to be caught at last, our outlaw, and released from the burden of other men's compulsions, other men's dreams?

The CIB has decided to take further measures. The Incident Squad, retitled the Special Assaults Section, is to be increased from three to seven and will have access to a computer.

Of course bureaucracy tends to increase quite independently of demand, but this new move does seem to be justified. The number of assaults has reached triple figures.

Budgetary considerations, the Minister announces, will allow for a second expansion at the end of the financial year, "should eventualities require it.” And of course they will.

Now that the number of victims has reached the magic figure of a century there are seven identikit pictures, and the strange thing is that they are no longer the clichs of three months ago; each of them has now developed a distinctive character. What we are faced with, it seems, is seven prowlers, all working in the same strictly defined area and using the same methods.

This surely is too much of a coincidence. The work of the prowler begins to look like the cooperative efforts of a gang; except of course that by their very nature these crimes are private and solitary. Or perhaps a club has been formed to act out the attacks as they have been described in the newspaper. A bizarre notion! Who would devise such an entertainment and why? Still, imitators there are, and more than one of them. Of this the police have no doubt.

And how does the prowler himself feel about this, the original prowler, I mean, the initiator, whose integrity consists in his commitment to his own crimes? How strange if his path should cross that of one of the others, if they should meet face to face over the body of a
victim; or stranger still, if two of the false prowlers should meet, each just sufficiently like the original to be recognizable but each seeing in the other enough that is different to make clear how much of themselves they have allowed to creep in, to what an extent they are no longer imitators of the prowler but significant variants. If two of the false prowlers were captured would there be enough in common between them for the real prowler to be identified? And supposing all seven to be taken, would it be clear which of them was real? All seven, as the police know, would lay claim to the first attack, might even create a prior one, in order not to be deprived of the rest. (Perhaps one might guess that the least insistent of them, assured of his authenticity, would be the true original.) This is clear from the large number of men who have already come forward and confessed to the crimes. Men of all ages and occupations, from a fifteen-year-old schoolboy to a retired shipbuilder of seventy-seven: widowers, pensioners, young men newly married, metho-drinkers, known homosexuals—all desperate, it would seem, to have the prowler's acts define them.

Some of these men simply want to draw attention to themselves. Others have become obsessed with the assaults and long to be their perpetrator, to appropriate to themselves the daring, the fierce aura of sexuality they believe the prowler must be possessed of, his deep sense of relief when, returning to his own house, he stands naked before the mirror and says, "Yes, I am the prowler,” or, concealing his violence behind a front of patient domesticity, slips in quietly beside his wife.

There are those among these men who genuinely believe they are the prowler. Faced under the glare of the arc-lamps with indisputable proof that they are not, they break down and sob, they plead with Senior Detective Pierce to examine the evidence again, to find something, some small detail, that will convict them; they resist, they fight, they clutch at straws. Senior Detective Pierce finds these men pathetic. Of all the males in the suburb, they alone are above suspicion, since the one thing they lack (what else does their behaviour mean?) is the courage to commit the crime.

As for the others, the self-confessed prowlers who know they are lying, Senior Detective Pierce has begun to dread their arrival, more even than a new victim. Each of them has a bad conscience. Confessing to the prowler's crimes is a kind of diversion tactic. It is meant to save them from confessing to the real crime they have committed—or think
they have committed. They are men who are laden with guilt, who hope that punishment and conviction for one crime, even if it is not their own, will be sufficient and will relieve them of dread. The real crime, in some cases, is trivial, the anxiety is not. And it is the weight of all this secret guilt that Senior Detective Pierce finds so oppressive, since he cannot absolve the men of it, and could not, even if he were to extend to them the one thing in his dispensation, the recognition that the prowler's crimes are theirs. Faced with the men's despair when he declares them innocent, their deep sense of grievance, their sullen hostility, Senior Detective Pierce, on one or two occasions, has come close to breaking down. He has been trained to deal with crime—specific incidents—not with deep, unspecified guilt.

Still, information about all these men is fed into the computer; they become part of Senior Detective Pierce's memory bank. Even if they did not commit the prowler's crimes they reflect them. Only when all the facts have been collated, and many things that are not facts as well, will some sort of pattern emerge.

But when will that be? And what pattern?

Senior Detective Pierce has come to believe, as the number of victims continues to rise and the identikit pictures top thirteen, that sooner or later the whole male and female population of the suburb will find its way into his files, every man a potential prowler, every female a victim. And what then?

In the middle of the last century in Rome, the old stone prison of the Mammertine on the Capitoline Hill, where St. Peter is said to have been jailed, was set up as an oratory. Here, among the usual votive offerings, silver hearts, limbs, eyes with little filagree bows and angels about them, symbols of a miraculous return to wholeness, hung offerings of another sort: knives, meat-cleavers, clubs still wet from the skulls they had broken, and damp hair sticking to them, cords that had been used in a strangling, a dirty pillow, a pair of blood-stained scissors. The whole place, one writer tells us, was haunted; as if all the city's murders had gathered there and hung about, palpably, in the dark. Blood and the odour of blood had seeped into the stones. The air was thick with unspoken confessions and pleas for absolution. Within the city, a temple had
been dedicated to the city's secret crimes. The criminals had crept away, but the instruments they had used were left to speak for them in a language, at once concrete and abstract, that made the whole place a whispering hall for abominable declarations, where the guilty might come, under cover of dark, to relieve themselves of the tokens of their guilt …

S
ENIOR
D
ETECTIVE
P
IERCE,
who is surprisingly literate, has read of this place and begins to be haunted by it. He also has dreams in which he imagines himself to be a computer, softly whirring as the pieces tumble into place within him and the day's facts are fed in, some dark act committed in the streets of the suburb, a new face (victim or violator, it hardly matters which), a private fantasy brought to light at last and tucked away in the memory bank, which is his own head. His head is filled with the crimes, real and imaginary, of a whole suburb, it bursts with them, the violence calmly subdued in compulsive rituals or breaking out in savage bloodshed. He staggers up out of these dreams in a cold sweat, terrified of where he might have been and who might have seen him there.

Often when Senior Detective Pierce has these dreams he is awake.

What frightens him most is that he has begun to predict the crimes: the time, the place, the kind of woman. Has his accumulation of so much information, his entry into the pattern that lies under the facts, given him insight—unconscious as yet, but accurate—into the real nature of the crimes, so that a part of what is still to occur becomes visible to him? Does he begin to have so godlike a knowledge of us all that every detail of what we will, even those things that have not yet entered our heads and become the focus of will, is already clear to him? Or is there some simpler and more sinister explanation?

Senior Detective Pierce has asked twice now to be relieved of his duties and sent back to the Vice Squad, but on both occasions his request was refused.

Why?
he wonders.

Is it because they have their eye on me and want to keep me where I can be watched? Even these notes are a dead giveaway. I know too much. I have become a primary suspect.

Confess! Confess!