The List Of Seven (23 page)

"Until one night in early April when the town's comeliest young woman was assaulted near the banks of the river. Sexually assaulted. After satisfying himself upon her, the attacker flew into a rage, and she was beaten savagely. She never saw his face. He never spoke, never made a sound; she could identify him only as 'a black shape.' "

"Was Alexander suspected?"

"In the course of their investigation, town officials routinely questioned authorities at Alexander's school—although everyone felt certain a grown man was responsible, as his size and strength would indicate, most likely the same man who'd been seen the previous fall. Students themselves were sequestered on the campus after dark. And all of them accounted for, in their beds at the time of the attack."

"Easy enough to arrange that. It was your brother, oi course."

Sparks nodded. "His interest in the fairer sex was asserting itself, and he had a new hunger to feed. Alexander had seldom chosen to moderate his appetites, and then only as an exercise in self-discipline. He had nothing but contempt for the fumbling chaperoned introductions school and society offered as the rituals of courtship. He stalked these girls and then struck without hesitation or remorse. Moral reservations for such an act fell completely outside the tenets of his philosophy; such considerations were, as he wrote to me, a childish refuge for the weak and indecisive. Most people lived with all the courage and conviction of Jersey cows bred for the slaughterhouse. The Superior Man took what he wanted from the world—and often the world was only too willing to award it—without any concern for the consequences."

"Unless he was caught."

"The chances of that, as he saw it, were too slight to even merit concern. He was supremely confident of his ability to outwit anyone. This attack occurred, by the way, two days before my meeting him. The polished black rock he gave me that day was taken from the riverbed where the girl was violated: his trophy of the conquest."

Doyle swallowed back a wave of disgust. "There must have been talk of the rape during your visit. Did your parents connect him to it?"

"Despite their experience with him—which you realize only resulted in a dread suspicion, never certainty—I don't believe that my parents as yet comprehended the singular wickedness of Alexander's mind."

As yet—Doyle took note of the phrasing.

"A much-ballyhooed search of the countryside for the assailant, of course, yielded nothing. It was a crime of cold calculation, not passion; he had covered his tracks expertly."

"He committed no other crimes?" asked Doyle.

"Not in that town. Not for the time being. At Alexander's request, through an arrangement made by his professors, he spent that following summer in Salzburg, studying chemistry

and metallurgy at the university. For good measure, he studied the foil and epee at the renowned fencing academy, another skill of which he soon gained mastery. A boy of thirteen, remember. His routine was established: He worked to sharpen scientific abilities during the day—this pup among the graybeards, creating new compounds and alloys in the laboratory, his knowledge growing to the encyclopedic—and his stealth and footpad skills at night. Alexander trained himself to require little sleep, an hour or two at most, freeing him to spend the hours between midnight and sunrise on the prowl. His nocturnal ramblings were every bit as directed and purposeful as his scientific studies: designed specifically to test and steel his nerves."

"How so?"

"Gaining entry to people's houses. He'd sit for hours in their bedrooms. Blend into shadows and corners. These people passing within inches of him, and his heart never increased a beat. Watching them sleep, taking small tokens of his visits—trophies again, he always comes back to this— never items of any great value, trifles, trinkets that wouldn't be missed. He became able to see nearly as well in the dark as most people do at noon. He grew to prefer the darkness to the daylight, whose hours he now spent exclusively indoors, in rapt study. By the end of Alexander's Austrian summer, he could move through the night like a ghost, silent, invisible.

"The night before his scheduled return to England, he allowed himself a single indulgence of the burgeoning appetite he had kept in check these many months. There was a particular girl whose room he had happened upon initially by chance. He found the sight of this girl asleep in her bed so powerfully excited him he was compelled to visit her obsessively. A blond beauty of seventeen, the only daughter of a prosperous burgher, she was in possession of many voluptuous charms, made all the more alluring by her seeming innocence of them. His interest assumed the form of a perverse courtship; he took to following her during the day. He found it thrilling to stand beside her in a shop, to pass her in the street and return her unsuspecting smile, but even so he never dared to speak to her. I believe that somewhere in the recesses of his heart he felt for this girl an authentic stirring of romantic love. He wrote poetry for her. Once he left a single red rose in a stemmed vase by the window. Alexander grew bolder with each succeeding visit, drawing back the covers, touching her hair. As he watched his beloved sleep, he began to impart requited yearning into her every unconscious gesture. He longed to reveal himself to her, to hold and possess her. But in the cold light of day, the tremors and weakness that welled up from the summoned memory of her beauty he found intolerable: The Superior Man could not abide such gaping vulnerability to the unruly fancies of another heart.

"So on his last night in Austria, Alexander slipped into her room for the final time. He doused a handkerchief in chloroform and placed it over his beloved's mouth. He carried her from the house undetected into the surrounding woods, where he set upon her and indulged his desires upon her like a night demon. When he was sated, he carried her much deeper into the woods, quieting her with the drug whenever she began to stir, bound her hand and foot, and laid her gently down in a bower of pine branches. By the time the panicked villagers found her at the end of the following day, Alexander was on the packet sailing back to England."

"He didn't kill her," said Doyle, surprised and relieved.

"No. Nor did he brutalize her after satisfying himself, as he had the other girl. I believe his feelings for her were more complicated, more personal, than any he had experienced before. With the warring sides of his nature at a standoff, the impulse to despoil had not won out. Upon his return, Alexander wrote eagerly to tell me about his 'summer romance.' When I wrote back with what I suppose was some hint of skepticism—ignorance, really, I had no knowledge of the ways of men and women aside from what he'd told me—as proof he sent me a lock of her hair."

"Always attempting to enlist you as his accomplice."

"But as little as I knew, as I held that blond lock in my hand, I felt the first shudder of misgiving about my brother's true nature. Something unpleasant radiated from that beautiful curl, some residue of suffering. I sensed somehow it was wrong. I discarded it immediately, threw it into the stream near my old oak, and I didn't write to Alexander for a week. In his next letter, he never mentioned the girl, nor did he voice any displeasure that I had not responded, going on as

if nothing had happened. I gratefully buried my uneasiness as an aberration. Our correspondence resumed."

Waiters were turning down the gas jets in the dining room. A small orchestra in another room began to play a Strauss waltz. Handsome couples took to the dance floor. The gay mood prevailing in the room, the dancers swirling about them, made no inroad to the core of Sparks's private burden. He stared into his drink, face drawn, his eyes haunted and febrile.

"And so we went along. The letters. Our yearly Easter visit. The only interruption to our exchanges came when travel to Europe with my family began. Even then there was always a packet of letters waiting upon my return. Alexander was absolutely faithful to me and I to him, always eager to near of my growth and progress, never overstepping the bounds our parents so vigilantly maintained. Never exhibiting anything but loving interest in my development. Or so I assumed. I realize now he was measuring my progress against the meticulous records he had kept of his own—like a rat in a laboratory experiment—to see if his methods for the development of the Superior Man were verifiable. And not least to reassure himself that my rate of advancement lagged well be-hind his; by no means would the student ever be allowed to surpass his master.

"As he entered his last year of school before university, and I neared the age, and nearly the size, he'd been when we'd first met, his letters stopped, without warning. I wrote to him repeatedly, with increasing desperation. No reply. Worse yet, no explanation. I felt as if a limb had been cut from my body, I wrote again and again, pleading with him to answer; what transgression had I unknowingly committed? Why had he forsaken me?"

"His work with you was finished."

"No. His intention was to shock me, by demonstrating how swiftly his favor could be withdrawn, to plant a seed of terror :n me that tightened his grip and rendered me even more dependent. Four months went by. A thousand scenarios of doom flowered in my imagination, until finally I was able to absolve myself of responsibility: It must have been my parents, I decided. They've discovered our link and taken decisive action against us; they've had Alexander moved, quarantined somewhere out of reach. Perhaps they really were as devious and vengeful as his letters over the last year had subtly begun to suggest. Their absolute steadiness of disposition with me did nothing to allay my suspicions, but only increased them. Whenever I inquired into his well-being, which I dared not do too frequently, they assured me Alexander was well and thriving. I knew it was a lie! He must be languishing, cut off from me at their command, every bit as bereft and miserable as I was. I wanted to retaliate, without giving them the satisfaction of knowing I was stung, so I began to willfully conceal my feelings from them, to put up the same stone wall of polite but distant self-sufficiency I'd seen Alexander assume in their presence. They sensed immediately that something was not right with me, but I refused their entreaties and denied any discomfort, all the while counting the days and hours until that Easter, when Alexander and I would be reunited. To my great surprise, our parents made no effort to deny us that meeting, which only served to confirm my conviction that their treachery was of a high and exalted order. "When we finally did meet, Alexander betrayed not the slightest uneasiness or dissatisfaction with our parents, and he was as pleasant and convivial with me in their company as always. Sitting on the veranda sipping hibiscus tea, we looked the very model of the upright English family, spending most of our time discussing Alexander's entrance to university that fall. Calling on the reserves of self-control Alexander had taught me so well, I restrained every impulse to pull him aside and beg for the truth about his withdrawal. The long afternoon was nearly passed before the opportunity came, once again on the walk through the gardens after dinner, ritualized now through the years of our visits, the two brothers ten paces ahead of their parents. Our faces and gestures betrayed no urgency; his words to me were few, but they were resonant with that conspiratorial tone of affiliation that I had longed all these months to hear. 'See your way clear to Europe this summer. In July. Alone.' He suggested Salzburg, famous for its music academy. I was stunned. How shall I manage it? With what resources? It seemed entirely beyond me. He said all that was up to me, but however I should do it, this was by far the most important assignment he would ever give me. I would try, I swore to him. I would try my

best. You must succeed, he said, at any cost. Our parents appeared behind us, and that was the end of our exchange."

"He wanted to meet you there," said Doyle.

'That, of course, was my assumption. Immediately upon our return home, I threw myself into what had up until that point been, at best, my desultory efforts to master the violin. What had been compulsory now became compulsive; I spent hours in practice every day. My dedication to the work was never questioned, only encouraged by my music-loving parents. To my amazement, I discovered mat I possessed no small aptitude for the instrument, almost to the point of prodigality. I was able to coax from those strings the music of a private universe, as if I had discovered an entirely new language that in many ways I found more eloquent than speech. From time to time, I would bemoan the lack of instructors adequate to the rapidly advancing level of my playing. I let mention that I had heard of a musical conservatory in Austria where the great talents of our age had found nurturance for the skills that carried them on to their splendid international careers.

"When some weeks later my parents presented the idea of my enrolling at that very academy for the coming summer, I feigned astonishment and showered them with boundless gratitude for their perceptiveness and generosity. I didn't know which gave me more pride: my cunning in securing the appointment or my actual achievement with the instrument. The next day I wrote Alexander the last letter I would ever send him, one cryptic sentence: 'The job is done.' I received no reply. In the middle of June, my parents accompanied me to Brighton—along with the valet who was to be my traveling companion—where they saw me off on my first solitary European adventure. I set sail for the Continent, arrived in Austria two days later, and was straightaway enrolled in the Salzburg lyceum, where I busied myself in my studies and waited for July and word from Alexander to arrive."

The dance floor was by this time filled with revelers. The orchestra began to assay the sentimental favorites of the day, as the hour of the New Year drew near. A frantic, angular energy animated the crowd, their enjoyment of the occasion hovering uncertainly between bona fide excitement and dutiful obligation.

"Did he send word?"

Sparks looked up at Doyle, his eyes transparent and cold. Doyle saw further into Sparks's private reaches than he had ever been previously allowed.