Shudder (16 page)

Anton parked his car in front of the building Natalie had described to him. It said ‘National Patriots' above the entrance. He studied the logo. Typical Nazi revivalist anesthetics.

Why was she mixed up with a bunch of obscure Nazis? She sounded very distressed over the phone and so was he now. This was the first time she had ever, as an adult, asked him to pick her up.

Something must be very wrong.

Anton looked at the gray sky from his rear window and then at the gray sidewalk. He got out of his car. He lighted a cigarette and stood there smoking.

Spouting the white smoke, he looked around, to see if anyone wanted to make something out of him smoking in public.

Everyone minded their own businesses.
They better be. They damn better be.

He looked at the time on his phone. What was keeping her? He was early, but surely she knew he would be early? Maybe she had forgotten his habits...they had drifted so much apart in the last years.

When he was almost forty, they took his stepdaughter away from him, because he was a heroin addict.

Heroin addict
.

Anton felt ancient anger stirring inside him.
Brain-dead, chicken-shit, pill-poppers trying to find someone at whose expense to feel smug about themselves
.

He was very good at his work back then, needing only a morning fix and an evening fix, and was far from the degenerates who beg for spare change on the streets, steal the hand bags of old ladies, or shoot down helicopters in action films.

He was no hoodlum.

He was more like a nineteenth century gentleman, who injected himself morphine in the morning and then proceeded to be a good husband, father and...surgeon, or writer, or whatever they were back then.

Like in Poe's stories. No one pounced on his characters waving badges, no one called them junkies. No, everyone patiently listened to their explanations about shimmering ghostly cities from other dimensions.

No one ever persecuted Sherlock Holmes for injecting cocaine to liven up his inner worlds.

These ignorant, uncouth bastards had taken Natalie away after he got caught out in a random drug test at work, and he had to go through that tedious, terrible methadone program, and then report weekly with a piss sample for a year, and then once a fortnight for another year, before they would give her back to him.

By the time he was pronounced ‘cured' and ‘clean', and ‘without relapses', by then she was an adult, and had already won her first scholarship, and had gone to Finland for three years, to study sociology.

He was proud and sad at the same time back then. Ever since, they were never really close again. She liked him and probably respected him. He certainly respected her but some important bond was broken.

Somewhere in the back of her mind, she almost certainly blamed him for being a weakling, for being a junkie.

Now, she called him with a trembling voice, asking for ‘Daddy' to come and take her from work. This meant things must be bad.

Anton sucked intensely at the remains of his cigarette, actually wrinkling it, crumpling it by his forceful inhalation, and then threw the stub away to land below his car.

He saw the National Patriot HQ door open.

There she was, going out of the building, looking so fragile. He grabbed her, hugged her, pecked her cheek, and steered her to his car.

* * * *

They sat in his home on the thick rug on the floor. At least Natalie was sitting, cross-legged, while Anton was lying on his right side, holding his cigarette with his left hand, and propping up his head with this right one.

Natalie was also smoking.

“I understand that it was a terrible shock,” Anton said, trying to keep up a no-nonsense attitude, “but I must say that you look terribly thin as well. How are you eating these days?'

Natalie looked at him with a guilty smile, which turned into a defiant grin. “I eat, I eat.”

“What did you eat today?”

“Nothing, but that's understandable.”

“Okay, what about yesterday?”

“I...had some nuts at work?”

Anton turned on the skeptical parental expression. “What about the day before yesterday?”

“Half an apple,” fibbed Natalie.

Anton eyed her for ten seconds. “Are you an anorexic, dear daughter?”

“No, no, of course not. I just...it's the strain lately...”

“Why not take a few days off?”

“Oh, I can't do that. Everyone is depending on me—especially now, that...now that Jane is dead...and the elections are so close.”

Anton pursed his lips. He saw that his lovely stepdaughter was in the grinder, trapped by the office merry-go-round, but why didn't she want to take a break?

This meant that she was so afraid to be alone with herself and her own thoughts, that she preferred to work herself to death rather than face this.

It was a manic state, which was encouraged by moral authorities as the only proper way to live.

Bastards.

“I'll be quite fine, Daddy, I just needed to talk to you, because today was such a big shock. Poor Jane.”

“Indeed. I'm surprised that you have not gone to pieces. You should be curled up like a baby and crying by now.”

Anton saw that Natalie took this as a compliment concerning her toughness.

“No,” he tried to clarify. “I mean it. You should let yourself go and shake in fear and cry. You should let your body react to this naturally. Don't bury this shock. You're doing yourself a bad favor bottling it up. You're in a safe place. You are not at work. Now's the time to do it. You can use my bedroom if you like.”

Natalie smiled tolerantly at his pop psychology. She knew she had to be tough and that she should never let down her guard—never relax. It was much better that way. Everything would collapse otherwise. “I hope they catch the person who is responsible soon,” she changed the angle of the conversation.

“They probably will. After all, good old Dave is the current sex-crime expert for the force.”

“David...” Natalie looked at her Daddy. “Do you think you can invite David to come over?”

“Ha, why not? I'll give him a call; it's only eight in the evening.”

Anton dialed Dave. The phone rang only once, before being snatched up on the other side.

“Hello, Tony. Boy, am I glad to hear you.”

“How you doing, Dave?”

“Fucking horrible. Have you heard from Natalie?”

“Yes, she's here with me. She's very upset.”

“I can imagine. I was at the morgue today and found out the she discovered one of the bodies.”

“One of the bodies? There are more?”

“Yeah, as I said, everything's pretty fucking horrible.”

“Listen, do you want to come over for a little while?”

“I sure do. I'll be over in half an hour.”

“Great. Take a bottle of wine or something.”

“I will. See you soon.”

Anton rang off and thought for a second. Then he remembered that in the spur of the moment he had bought some fruit-flavored yogurts less than a week ago.

He went to the kitchen, rescued the tiny red buckets from behind the sausages, and broke off one yogurt from the rest with a sharp crack. Together with a small tea spoon, he pushed it into Natalie's hands.

He snarled playfully at her, as he used to do when she was a kid and gave him trouble.

With an unstable smile, she forced herself to eat it.

Anton opened the door, and let David in. David also looked somewhat haggard.

“Anton,” he exclaimed and pumped his hand and patted his shoulder.

“Natalie,” he said and hugged the frail black girl. “How are you?” he asked and looked carefully into her eyes.

“Fine, much better now,” she answered and broke loose to light another cigarette. Anton appeared with three glasses and a corkscrew.

Now all three of them lounged on the soft thick carpet.

After the conversation hovered unformed around a number of topics, Dave decided to bring up politics, “Hey, you notice that they upped the retirement age again?”

“Yes, I read that a day ago,” Anton said. “Bloody shameless thieves.”

“Everyone is being such a pussy about that,” nodded Dave, “no one calls a spade a spade anymore. Except these guys, the something patriots, I read their statement, powerful stuff.”

Anton looked at his daughter, “Don't you work with them now, actually?”

Natalie nodded. She yawned, delicately covering her mouth with the back of her hand, and blinked for a few seconds. “Yes, these are the National Patriots,” she said dismissively, “they wrote this rubbish before I came on board, now I'll have to do some quick damage control.”

“Come on, you're too hard on them. I thought it was a good statement,” Dave said earnestly, cajoling Natalie to continue.

She continued, “It may sound good to some lay members of the public like you…” She rewarded him with a quick flash of her tongue. “But it's no good from a political point of view. In this game, if you want to play with the big boys, to be a party with some real chances, you can't risk alienating the military or the big businesses. This is what the dorks have accomplished with their statement.”

* * * *

Another hour passed. Natalie started talking of taxis, but on Anton's insistence , she retreated to his bedroom to sleep.

The two men remained in the living room, eying each other with a certain relief, for they no longer had to keep up a fragile bubble of safe topics.

“So, tell me, Dave, what's been happening?” asked Anton putting his glass on the carpet and fishing out another cigarette from his pack.

“I don't even know where to begin.”

“You said on the phone that Jane wasn't the only victim,” Anton prompted him.

“Ah yes, yes, she's not the only one.” Dave tried to keep the memory of Georgette's body from interfering with his tale. “There are three women in all, one twenty-something, one thirty-something and one fifty-something, found in the last week.”

“All of them suffocated?”

“Yes,” Dave's eyes darted to the wall behind which Natalie now slept, “and in a way I'm glad that Natalie found Jane and not one of the others.”

“How come?”

“The other two were suffocated by their own shit.”

Anton's eyebrows jumped and his jaw compensated by sagging. Then he quickly regained control of himself. “Shit you say...how exactly?”

“The bastard apparently tied them up and fed them their own shit.”

“He broke in and raped them?”

“No, it rather looks like they were all swingers who invited a stranger home to play.”

Anton let out a cloud of white smoke and watched it curl and swirl. “So, our culprit has killed a woman from three age groups, except the forty-somethings.”

“Yeah. I don't know yet if it's a system, or just accidental choice.”

“No fingerprints, no DNA?”

“No. We have one possible suspect, who looks like a latex freak. If it's him, that would explain the lack of evidence so far. The boys are working hard on the two newest cases, maybe they will find something.”

“You said that they were fed their own shit, not his.”

“Yeah,” Dave said. “Yeah,” he said again and stood up and looked out of Anton's window. It was night, and square lights were already shining from the buildings all around.

“That's another thing I don't understand,” said the detective without turning around, “what's with all that shit eating? How did that become a fashion?”

Anton smiled, “I've pondered that myself and perhaps my mighty intellect has seen something which your puny mortal brain has missed.”

Dave smiled weakly at his reflection in the windowpane, “Pray tell, wise one.”

“Point one: you will not deny that our civilization has an oral pathology.”

“I will not deny this, because I don't know what you mean.” Dave smelled the beginning of a lengthy discourse and took his place by the albino.

“Well,” said the albino, “almost everyone has eating disorders for one. A lot of women are anorexic, a lot of women are bulimic, and the ones in between are either tubs of lard who can't stop stuffing themselves, or are paranoiacs who count guiltily every calorie.”

Dave's lips twitched as another ghost of smile passed over them, “Put that way, I might agree. What about the men?”

“The men...” Anton waved a hand, dismissing all men as below contempt. “There's a rising number of male bulimics and anorexics, and the rest...well, you can't deny, that most men are now also obese or constantly sucking at a beer bottle.”

“Or at a cigarette, ahem, ahem.”

Anton took that with good grace. “Right, or a cigarette.”

“Granted then. Our civilization has an eating, drinking, and smoking disorder.”

“Right. This disorder is an oral pathology.”

“You've lost me again.”

“You know,” insisted Anton, “the first stage of the child's development.”

“Oh, riiight,” said the detective. “Yeah, I think I've read that somewhere.”

“This deepest layer in our psyches, the oral layer—” The albino spilled a drop of wine on the carpet as he gesticulated with his glass. “…is for some reason pathological on a mass level. Think of all the advertisements. There's always an open mouth eating something, sucking something, drinking something. Indeed, we call ourselves a ‘consumer society'. We have a fetish with consuming.”

“If you say so.”

Anton looked at the detective and quickly thought of a fitting example to make his point. “Back in nineteen seventy- two I think it was, a film appeared in adult movie theaters. Back then, there were no computers and no videos, and people had to go to a place packed with other wankers, and jerk off while watching the big screen. The film in question was
Deep Throat
.”

“I've seen it. It's ultra boring.”

“True.” Anton narrowed his eyes. “However, this film made more money than any Hollywood film ever has. Adjusted for inflation of course. “

Yes, these were concepts Dave understood instantly. “No shit?”

“No shit. The reason for that was just the fact that the actress in the film could deep throat.”

“I guess that freaked everyone out back then.”

“It did. A few years later, all the porn stars started doing it, or trying to do it. These days, we expect from every woman we have sex with, to do this.”

Dave gave a nervous cough. “Yeah, go on.”

“So you see, a society with an oral pathology, with eating disorders and throat fucking as a more visible examples of this pathology, it was only a question of time before shit eating came on the scene.”

“On the scene obscene. I still don't see how one leads to the other.”

“Neither do I, to be perfectly honest,” admitted the albino and tickled his oral pathology with another lungful of smoke.

“Anyway.” Dave held out his empty glass in front of Anton, but the albino shook his head. The wine was finished. “Want some tea, detective?”

“Later maybe, thanks.”

“You were saying?'

“What were we talking about?”

“Shit eating. You said ‘anyway…'”

“Ah yes. Anyway, it was German porn, I think, which introduced shit eating to the masses. Why did it become popular with us?”

“Not only German porn,” Anton said with brisk confidence, “German porn and Japanese porn introduced it to the masses.”

An obliging vintage image of a Japanese actress dressed like a schoolgirl pooping on some balding man popped into Dave's head. “Okay, I think you're right.”

“So, what would you say is the thing which connects Germany and Japan?” asked Anton mischievously.

“You obviously have an idea, oh wise one. Lead on.”

“The Second World War.” Anton said with a triumphant glint in his eyes. “Both nations tried at the same time to conquer the world and both were defeated.”

“Right, black and white soldiers walking very quickly with their hands up in the air. So?”

“So, these two super-militarist nations populated by self-designated master races, had to turn into super-pacifist, super-tolerant nations, and this did not happen because they suddenly chose to change, but because they were bombed into submission.”

“Yeah, Nagasaki and...Dresden?” Dave knew his history more or less, some years ago he had a period of surfing online encyclopedias for hours on end.

Anton pointed a forefinger at the ceiling. “Ah, Nagasaki, that's another question. I wrote an interesting article once, exploring the connection between the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the wave of postwar Japanese movies, dealing with huge monsters destroying their cities.”

“Where was it published?”

“In a blog,” Anton said a trifle defensively. “Anyway. So Germany and Japan were defeated and the Germans had to learn to think of Hitler not as of a demigod who made them into superhumans, but as of a lunatic; while the Japanese had to listen on the radio to emperor Hirohito confessing on the insistence of the Americans, that he is not a god.”

“Yeah, they lost the war, and they had to take a lot of shit.”

“Exactly my point.” Anton tapped the carpet with vigor, “exactly my point. They had to take this shit politely and gratefully. I mean, intellectually they were completely morally right to become polite pacifists, but deep down, where human nature is still on the level of kill or be killed, on that level they knew that they were taking shit. That is why they pioneered shit-eating porn.”

“An interesting theory Doctor Martorino.”

“Thank you, professor Cohran.”

“But we were not defeated in the war. We won it.”

“Yes, yes, that was just an example. This is the mechanism which I think popularized shit play. On one hand we have a civilization with oral disorders anywhere you turn. On the other hand, this civilization has taught its people how to take shit and like it, not least of all by using happy pills and or various legal and illegal stimulants to evade noticing it.

“Once it became a trend, it clicked with a lot of people, because a lot of people are people with oral disorders, who have to take shit from someone every day of their lives. You know, neurotic mechanism often work in a like-for-like manner.”

“Whatever you say doctor Martorino,” agreed Dave and stood up again, to get another dose of fresh air from the window. “I'm sure you'll get a Nobel for this discovery.”

“Or a golden turd award or something.” Anton's attempt to lighten up the atmosphere and relax Dave fell flat. The detective mused tensely without even turning around. “Why does my killer kill other people with their shit?” he asked somewhat angrily. “Is he compensating for something? Would he himself eat shit according to your theories?”

“Probably, probably he would,” Anton said. “Maybe he doesn't admit his desire to do that to himself. He would see this as a terrible weakness.”

“I don't blame him.”

“Right, so he projects it on other people. He doesn't eat shit—he gets other people to do it instead of him.”

“Projection eh? Does stuff like that really happen?”

“Yup, classical psychoanalytical concept.”

Dave turned and shook his head at the albino, “You must be the last person alive who still reads that stuff.”

“Yah,” Anton said and looked at the table. Then he looked back at the detective. “Anyway, what about that robot sex toy that you're hunting?”

“Oh, I'll try to catch it tomorrow evening.”

“Really? How?”

“I'll use myself as bait, lead it, hopefully, to my home, and my stakeout buddy Andy will nab it.”

“Well, good luck with that,” Anton said dubiously. “Why don't you use some other place instead of your home? Sounds a bit dangerous.”

“Want me to lead it to
your
home?”

“I'm serious. Can't you rent a flat and lead it there?”

Dave shrugged. “Well, it's too late for this now. We'll just have to hope it works out.”