Red 1-2-3 (10 page)

She thought it was fortunate that she was such a quick learner. And she also told herself that this was one course she could not afford to flunk.

The Big Bad Wolf had awakened early in the morning in order to do some work in the final minutes of dark before dawn light filled his small office.

This was always a productive time. Most people, he believed, awakened sluggish and irked at the thought of another day of soul-deadening routine, in a fog until they slammed down a cup or two of coffee.

Not him. The Wolf was filled with enthusiasm and excitement over the coming day, because he had planned something he thought would be truly inventive and unsettling. He imagined it was the way an athlete would feel awaiting the opening whistle of a big game. Murder, as he’d written, lent itself to sporting metaphors.

Words crowded the screen in front of him. His focus was intense. As always, he spent a few moments considering his position in the world of violent death.

As he typed furiously, in an almost a stream-of-consciousness style—

though he detested that type of writing, because he thought it lazy and indulgent—he imagined himself some sort of existential hero. Grendel, he believed. Hannibal Lecter. Raskolnikov. Meursault.

I am not precisely an assassin,
although we share many qualities. An assassin
has some political fury behind his act. Whether this is John Wilkes Booth leaping from the balcony to the stage shouting “Sic semper tyrannis!” or an anarchist
taking aim at the archduke riding in his car down the wrong street in Sarajevo
or even a Borgia plot that imagines death as the easiest way to consolidate
power. To an assassin, the end justifies the means. That same quality may be
true for me and my three Reds and for many murderers—but the difference lies
in the approach. The assassin settles in to the Book Depository’s sixth floor and
aims down the barrel of his Carcano 6.5 mm carbine at the president’s head
and remembers his Marine Corps training as he gently squeezes the trigger.

“Red mist,” they call it now in shooting circles. But for me, that moment is the
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easiest. It is the buildup that creates the real excitement of that inevitable gathering together. I do not imagine that an assassin gains the same pleasure as I do
in planning the act. Perhaps it is the difference between foreplay and orgasm,
between being an attentive lover and merely being eager to conclude. Maybe.

But the thing that distinguishes me from an assassin is the nature of our
intimacy. While we each may have studied our victims with precision, the
assassin hates what he intends to kill and wants to make some allegedly important point. Everything he does is designed for that moment. A death is scheduled to create a vacuum that the assassin believes will be filled by what he
wants. In a way, this is limiting. My own approach with the three Reds is far
more intense. I have no political restrictions on my design. The three Reds are
part of a grand design. What I plan is far closer to art than politics. I may have
important points to make, but these are like brushstrokes, not loud speeches. I
won’t be leaping from any balcony to a stage shouting “The South is avenged!”

but someday soon I will be just as famous.

For me, it’s not about hatred. Instead, I am in love with my three Reds.

But each love is different.

Just as each death has to be different.

A powerful smell of bacon began to penetrate the office. The Big Bad Wolf craned his head, and he could hear sizzling coming from the stove. The popping noise was likely to soon join with the more subtle sounds of eggs being scrambled and the toaster ejecting slices of toast. It would probably be sourdough, which Mrs. Big Bad Wolf made in her own electric bread maker, and which she knew was his favorite.

Mrs. Big Bad Wolf liked to prepare large breakfasts.
Most important
meal of the day.
He remembered that phrase from the movie
Ordinary
People
.
When did it come out? Twenty years ago? Thirty?
Donald Sutherland was seated across from Timothy Hutton in their Lake Forest mansion and was trapped by his son’s grief and confusion and trying desperately to inject some sort of understandable normalcy into their day-to-day turmoil. Except he was thwarted when Hutton hesitated and Mary Tyler 67

JOHN KATZENBACH

Moore, who played the cold and damaged mother, swept the breakfast away from her son and dashed it into the sink and the disposal.

The Wolf pictured the scene.
It was pancakes,
he thought. The actress had made pancakes.
Or maybe French toast. I’m sure of it.
Then he doubted himself.
It might have been waffles.

He didn’t like pancakes as much; they made him feel overfull and sluggish, unless there was really fancy Vermont maple syrup purchased from a gourmet market available. He hated the fake syrup the big grocery chains carried. It tasted like oil to him.

Again the wolf smiled.
I am a gourmand of breakfasts,
he thought,
and
a gourmand of killing.

He heard his wife calling his name. He closed up the computer and encrypted the latest files, using a predictable password:
Grimm
. He was suddenly famished.
Even the greatest killers need to eat,
he told himself as he pushed back from his desk.
It’s just that they feed on more than eggs and
bacon and freshly baked sourdough bread.

He thought he needed to make that point in his manuscript, but it could wait until later. He was also stretching his imagination. There were a few necessary upcoming excuses he needed to make to his wife. Places he needed to be and things he needed to do that he didn’t want to be questioned about. This was something that really intrigued him: the need to appear normal when great things were in motion around him. He thought:
The backdrop music of my life needs to be a simple, solitary violin.

No huge symphonic chords that attract attention.
He smiled.
And no heavy
metal screeching guitars, either.

From down the hallway, he heard a cheery, “On the table. Eggs and bacon.”

“Coming, dear,” he shouted to Mrs. Big Bad Wolf, not unpleasantly, eager to get the day started.

68

8

Mrs. Big Bad Wolf collected the breakfast dishes and dutifully scraped the remains into the trash compactor before loading knives, forks, plates, and cups into the electric dishwasher. As usual, her husband had carefully sliced the crust edges away from his toast, using only the crisp center portion to sop up the runny eggs. She had seen these orphans on his morning plates for fifteen years, and although she thought it wasteful, and a part of her believed the crust was the best part of the toast, she never said anything to him about this eccentricity. Nor had she ever—even though she knew he would invariably do this when she put the plate in front of him—sliced the edges off for him before they sat at the table.

This morning she was late for the work that she more often than not disliked, and she knew she had a desk piled up with mundane duties that would drag on throughout the day. She imagined that after putting in her eight hours the list of to-do items clogging her calendar would be only modestly diminished. She envied her husband. Her workaday life seemed devoted to ever-increasing amounts of the deadly same, over and over. He, on the other hand, was the creative force in their relationship.

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JOHN KATZENBACH

He was the writer; he was special. He was unique, like no man she’d ever known, and that was why she married him. He provided vibrant color in her dull dirt-brown world and nothing made her feel better than introducing him to coworkers, saying, “
This is my husband. He’s a novelist.
”
She sometimes berated herself by thinking that all she brought to their relationship was comprehensive health insurance and a regular paycheck and the occasional hurried bout in bed, and then she would dismiss this awful idea and persuade herself that even if it seemed like a cliché, every great writer needed a muse, and she surely was his. This idea made her proud.

She sometimes imagined herself to be willowy, slender, gossamer-dressed, which was the image she suspected an illustrator drawing a writer’s
inspiration
would create. That she was short and stocky, a little overweight, with mousy brown hair and a smile that seemed lopsided no matter how much pleasure she meant to express, was irrelevant. Inside, she was beautiful. She knew this. Why else would he have fallen in love with and married her?

And, after so many fallow years, so many literary fits and starts and frustration, to see him once again eager to lock himself away in the spare bedroom that he’d taken over as his writing studio, colored her day and made heading off to work less painful. She envisioned bundles of words, filling pages, relentlessly stacking up by the printer.

Mrs. Big Bad Wolf often wished she had his imagination.

It would be nice,
she thought,
to be able to live in made-up worlds where
you control the outcome of all the characters. You can make whomever you
want fall in love. You can kill off whomever you want. You deliver success or
failure, sadness or happiness. What a wonderful luxury.

It was not unusual for her to steal a glance at the closed door to the office, wondering what special world was taking form inside. Like Odys-seus strapped to the mast of his ship, she longed to hear the siren’s songs.

She paused, standing at the sink. Water was running over her hands and she knew she should reach for the dishwashing soap and start the machine before leaving for her office, but in that second of envy, she felt a twinge on her left side, just below her breast. The sensation—it wasn’t even 70

RED 1–2–3

significant enough to call
a pain
—sent a shaft of fright directly through her, and she gripped the counter edges to steady herself as a rapid dizziness swept over her. For an instant she felt hot, as if an oven door within her had been opened, and she caught her breath sharply.

The only words she could think of were
not again
.

She slowed her intake, tried to force her pulse to return to a normal pace. She closed her eyes and cautiously did an inventory of her body. She felt a little like a mechanic working over a car engine with some mysterious failure.

She reminded herself that she had just the other day been in to see her doctor and received a completely clean bill of health. She’d gone through the routine of poking and prodding and answering questions, opening her mouth wide, feeling the electrocardiograph leads placed on her body and waiting while the machine chewed out an assessment. And when her doctor had smiled, and begun to reassure her, it had been musical, even if she hadn’t quite believed it.

No signs.

She almost said this out loud.

This was the trouble with having a faulty heart. It made her imagine that every twinge and every misplaced beat signaled the end. She thought to herself that she didn’t have an interesting enough life to be this paranoid.

Mrs. Big Bad Wolf reached over to a countertop drainage rack, where she had placed a few of the bigger pans that wouldn’t fit into the dishwasher. She lifted out a large skillet made of stainless steel and held it up in front of her eyes. She could see her reflection in the clean, polished metal.

But unlike with a mirror, the portrait that stared back at her was slightly distorted, as if it was out of focus.

She told herself:
You were beautiful once,
even if this wasn’t true.

Then she searched for pain: None in the eyes. None in the corners of her mouth. None in that extra flesh that sagged around her jaw.

She pushed further. None in her feet. None in her legs. None in her stomach.

She held up her left hand and wiggled the fingers.

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JOHN KATZENBACH

Nothing. No sudden shock of hurt plunging through her wrist.

As if entering a dangerous minefield, she began to mentally examine her chest, an explorer searching some unknown territory. She breathed in and out slowly, all the time watching the face in the steel reflection, as if it were someone else’s and would display some telltale sign that she could spot. There were experts who had studied facial expressions, and detectives who believed that by merely examining a face they could tell when someone was lying or cheating or even covering up some illness. She had seen these people on television.

But her breathing seemed regular. Her heartbeat seemed solid and steady. She touched her rib cage with her fingers, prodding it. Nothing.

And her face remained flat, without affect.
Like a poker player,
she thought.

Then she slowly lowered the pan back to the drying rack.
No. Okay. It was
nothing. A little bit of indigestion. Your heart isn’t going to stop today.

She reminded herself to go to work—and to hurry, maybe even speed, to make up for the minutes lost to dying fears. “I’m leaving now,” she shouted. There was a small silence, then a muffled reply from inside the locked office.

“I might be out a bit doing some research, dear. Maybe late for dinner.”

She smiled. The word
research
encouraged her. She believed he was really making progress, and she knew enough to make sure that nothing she did would upset that fragile state.

“Okay, honey. Whatever you say. I’ll leave a plate for you in the micro-wave if you need to get home late.”

Mrs. Big Bad Wolf didn’t wait for a response, but she was happy. This sounded like the most mundane conversation any couple could have. It was so ordinary, it reassured her. The writer was
working;
and like the worker bee she considered herself, she was heading out to her job. Nothing as
different
as a heart attack could ever enter into a world so determinedly normal.