I had seen only one case of hypertrichosis in my life, when I was a resident physician in Miami and rotating through pediatrics. A Mexican woman gave birth to a girl, and two days later the infant was covered with a fine light-gray hair almost two inches long. Thick tufts protruded from her nostrils and ears, and she was photophobic, her eyes overly sensitive to light.
In most hypertrichotic people, hairiness progressively increases until the only areas spared are mucous membranes and palms and soles, and in some extreme cases, unless the person frequently shaves, the hair on the face and brow can become so long it has to be curled so the person can see. Other symptoms can be anomalies of the teeth, stunted genitalia, more than the normal number of fingers and toes and nipples, and an asymmetrical face.
In earlier centuries, some of these wretched souls were sold to carnivals or royal courts for amusement. Some were thought to be werewolves.
“Wet, dirty hair. Like a wet, dirty animal,” Dr. Ruth Stvan supposed. “I wonder if the reason I saw only his eyes when he appeared at my door is because his entire face was covered with hair? And maybe he had his hands in his pockets because they were covered with hair, too?”
“Certainly, he couldn’t go out in normal society looking like that,” I replied. “Unless he goes out only after dark. Shame, sensitivity to light and now murder. He might limit his activities to darkness, anyway.”
“I suppose he could shave,” Stvan pondered. “At least those areas people might see. Face, forehead, neck, tops of the hands.”
“Some of the hair we found appeared to have been shaved,” I said. “If he were on a ship, he had to do something.”
“He must undress, at least partially, when he kills,” she said. “All this long hair he leaves.”
I wondered if his genitalia were stunted, and if this might have something to do with why he undressed his victims only from the waist up. Perhaps to see normal adult female genitalia was to remind him of his own inadequacy as a male. I could only imagine his humiliation, his rage. It was typical for parents to shun a hypertrichotic infant at birth, especially if they were like the powerful, proud Chandonnes on the rich, exclusive Île Saint-Louis.
I imagined this tormented son, this espèce de sale gorille, living in a dark space inside his family’s centuries-old home and going out only at night. Criminal cartel or not, a wealthy family with a respected name might not want the world to know he was their son.
“There’s always the hope record checks can be run in France to see if there have been any babies born with this condition,” I said. “That shouldn’t be hard to track, since hypertrichosis is so rare. Only one in a billion people, or something like that.”
“There will be no records,” Stvan matter-of-factly stated.
I believed her. His family would have made certain of that. Close to noon, I left Dr. Stvan with fear in my heart and ill-gotten evidence in my briefcase. I went out through the back of the building, where vans with curtains in the windows waited for their next sad journey. A man and a woman in the drab clothing of sparrows waited on a black bench against the old brick wall. He held his hat in his hand, staring down at the ground. She looked up at me, her face pinched by grief.
I walked very fast on cobblestones along the Seine as terrible images came to me. I imagined his hideous face flashing out of the dark when a woman opened her door to him. I imagined him wandering like a nocturnal beast, selecting and stalking until he struck and savaged again and again. His revenge in life was to make his victims look at him. His power was their terror.
I stopped and scanned. Cars were relentless and fast. I felt dazed as traffic roared and kicked grit in my face, and I had no idea how I was going to get a taxi. There was no place for one to pull over. Side streets I passed were empty of traffic and I saw no hope of a taxi along any of them, either.
I began to get a panic attack. I fled back up stone steps, back into the park, and sat on a bench, catching my breath while the scent of death continued to drift through flowers and trees. I closed my eyes and turned my face up to the winter sun, waiting for my heart to run a little slower while beads of cold sweat slid under my clothes. My hands and feet were numb, my aluminum briefcase hard between my knees.
“You look like you could use a friend.” Jay Talley’s voice suddenly sounded above me.
I jumped and gasped.
“I’m sorry,” he softly said as he sat next to me. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“What are you doing here?” I asked as thoughts madly clashed, muddy and bloody and slamming into one another like foot soldiers on a battlefield.
“Didn’t I tell you we’d look after you?”
He unbuttoned his tobacco-colored cashmere overcoat and slipped out a pack of cigarettes from an inside pocket. He lit one for each of us.
“You also said it was too dangerous for any of you to show up here,” I said accusatorially. “So I go in and do my dirty work, and here you are, sitting in the damn park right at the Institut’s damn front door.”
I angrily blew out smoke and got to my feet. I grabbed my briefcase.
“Just what kind of game are you playing with me?” I asked him.
He dipped into another pocket and pulled out a cellular phone.
“I thought you might need a ride,” he said. “I’m not playing a game. Let’s go.”
He pressed numbers on his phone and said something in French to whoever was at the other end.
“Now what? Is the Man from U.N.C.L.E. coming to pick us up?” I bitterly said.
“I just called a taxi. I believe the Man from U.N.C.L.E. retired a few years ago.”
We walked out to one of the quiet side streets, and minutes later a taxi pulled over. We climbed in and Talley stared at the briefcase in my lap.
“Yes,” I answered his unspoken question.
When we reached my hotel, I took him up to my room, because there was no other place we could talk without the risk of being overheard. I tried Marino, and he didn’t answer.
“I need to get back to Virginia,” I said.
“That’s easy enough to arrange,” he said. “Whenever you want.”
He hung the do not disturb sign outside the door and fastened the burglar chain.
“First thing in the morning.”
We settled in the sitting area by the window, a small table between us.
“I take it Madame Stvan opened up to you,” he said. “That was the harder nut to crack, if you must know. By now the poor woman’s so paranoid—and for good reason—we didn’t think she’d tell the truth to anyone. I’m glad my instincts were right.”
“Your instincts?” I asked.
“Yes.” His eyes stayed on mine. “I knew if anyone could get through to her, it would be you. Your reputation precedes you and she can’t have anything but the utmost respect for you. But it helps just a little that I have personal insight about you, too.” He paused. “Because of Lucy.”
“You know my niece?” I didn’t believe him.
“We were in various training programs at the same time in Glynco,” he replied, referring to the national academy in Glynco, Georgia, where ATF, Customs, Secret Service, Border Patrol and some sixty other law enforcement agencies did their basic training. “I used to feel kind of sorry for her, in a way. Her presence always managed to generate a lot of talk about you, as if she didn’t have any talents on her own.”
“I can’t do a tenth of what she can,” I said.
“Most people can’t.”
“What does any of this have to do with her?” I wanted to know.
“I think she has to be Icarus and fly too close to the sun because of you. I hope she doesn’t push that myth too far and fall from the sky.”
The comment shot fear through me. I had no idea what Lucy was doing right now. Talley was right about what he said, too. My niece always had to do everything bigger, better, faster and riskier than I did, as if competing against me would finally win the love she didn’t believe she deserved.
“Hair transferred from the killer to his victims in the Paris cases is definitely not the hair of the unidentified man in my cooler,” I said, and I explained the rest to him.
“But this weird hair was on his clothes?” Talley tried to understand.
“On the inside of them. Just think of this as a hypothetical. Let’s say the clothing was worn by the killer and his body is covered with this dense, long baby-fine hair. So it transfers to the inside of his clothing, which he takes off and makes his victim put on before he drowns him.”
“The victim being the guy in the container. Thomas.” Talley paused. “This hair’s all over Loup-Garou’s body? Then he obviously doesn’t shave it.”
“It wouldn’t be easy shaving your entire body on a regular basis. Most likely, he shaves only those areas people might see.”
“And there’s no effective treatment. No drug or anything.”
“Lasers are being used with some success. But he may not know that. Or more likely, his family wasn’t going to permit him to show up at a clinic, especially after he started killing.”
“Why do you think he exchanged clothes with the man you found in the container? With Thomas.”
“If you’re going to escape on a ship,” I surmised, “you wouldn’t want to be in designer clothes, assuming your theory about the hand-me-downs is true. It could also be spite, contempt. Getting in the last word. We could speculate all day long, but there’s never a formula, only the damage left behind.”
“Can I get you anything?” he asked.
“An answer,” I said. “Why didn’t you tell me Dr. Stvan was the one who survived? You and the secretary-general sat there telling me this story when you knew all along it was she you were talking about.”
Talley was silent.
“You were afraid it would scare me off, weren’t you?” I said. “The Loup-Garou sees her and tries to kill her, so maybe he would see me and try to kill me, too?”
“Various people involved were doubtful you would go see her if you knew the whole story.”
“Well, then these various people don’t know me very well,” I said. “In fact, I would be more likely to go if I knew something like that. The hell with how well you think you know me and can predict this and that after having met Lucy one or two times.”
“Kay, it was because of Dr. Stvan’s insistence. She wanted to tell you herself for a very good reason. She’d never divulged all of the details to anyone, not even the detective who is her friend. He was only able to supply us with a rough sketch.”
“Why?”
“Again, the people protecting the killer. If they somehow found out and thought she might have gotten a good look at him, she was afraid they might do something to her. Or to her husband or two children. She believed you wouldn’t betray her by talking to anyone who might place her in a vulnerable position. But in terms of how much she told you, she said she wanted to make that decision when she was with you.”
“In case she didn’t trust me after all.”
“I knew she would.”
“I see. So mission accomplished.”
“Why are you so angry with me?” he asked.
“Because you’re so presumptuous.”
“I don’t mean to be,” he said. “I just want us to stop this werewolf-freak before he kills and mutilates anybody else. I want to know what makes him tick.”
“Fear and avoidance,” I said. “Suffering and rage because he was punished for something that wasn’t his fault. He anguished alone. Imagine being intelligent enough to comprehend all that.”
“He would hate his mother most,” Talley said. “He might even blame her.”
Sunlight polished his hair like ebony and caught his eyes at the edge, flecking them with gold. I saw his feelings before he could rush them back into hiding. I got up and looked out the window because I did not want to look at him.
“He would hate women he sees,” Talley said. “Women he could never have. Women who would scream in horror if they saw him, saw his body.”
“Most of all, he would hate himself,” I said.
“I know I would.”
“You paid for this trip, didn’t you, Jay?”
He got up and leaned against the window frame.
“Not some big corporation after this One-Sixty-Fiver cartel,” I went on.
I looked at him.
“You got Dr. Stvan and me together. You facilitated everything. You set all of it up and paid for it,” I said as I became more convinced and my incredulity grew. “You could do that because you’re very rich. Because your family’s very rich. That’s why you went into law enforcement, isn’t it. To get away from being rich. And then you act rich, look rich, anyway.”
For an instant, he was caught.
“You don’t like it when you’re not the one doing the interrogating, do you?” I said.
“It’s true I didn’t want to be like my father. Princeton, crewing, marrying into the proper family, kids all proper, everything proper.”
We were side by side now, looking down at the street as if something interesting was going on in the world outside our window.
“I don’t think you’ve bucked your father,” I said. “I think you fool yourself by being contraire. And certainly getting a badge and carrying a gun and piercing your ear is contraire if you went to Harvard and are a millionaire.”
“Why are you saying all this to me?”
He turned to look at me, and we were so close I could smell his cologne and feel his breath.
“Because I don’t want to wake up tomorrow and realize I’m part of some contraire script you’ve spun in your mind. I don’t want to believe I’ve just broken the law and every oath I’ve ever sworn to because you just happen to be a spoiled rich boy whose idea of being contraire is to encourage someone like me to do something so contraire it could ruin my career. What’s left of my career. And maybe land me in some fucking French prison.”
“I’d come visit you.”
“This isn’t funny.”
“I’m not spoiled, Kay.”
I thought of the do not disturb sign, the chained door. I touched his neck and traced the angle of his strong jaw, lingering on the corner of his mouth. I had not felt a man’s beard against my skin in more than a year. I reached up with both hands and pushed my fingers through his thick hair. It was warm from the sun, and his eyes were in mine, waiting to see what I might do with him.
I pulled him to me. I kissed and touched him aggressively, running my hands up and down his hard, perfect body as he fought with my clothes.
“God, you’re so beautiful,” he said into my mouth. “Christ, you’ve been driving me insane . . . !” He tore off a button and bent hooks. “Sitting there in front of the fucking secretary-general and I’m trying not to stare at your breasts.”
He gathered them into his hands. I wanted it raw and without limits. I wanted the violence in me to make love to his violence, because I didn’t want to be reminded of Benton, who had known how to slowly smooth me like a stone and skip me through erotic waters.
I pulled Talley into the bedroom, and he was no match for me because I had experience and skills he knew nothing of. I controlled him. I dominated. I helped myself to him until we were exhausted and slippery with sweat. Benton wasn’t in that room. But had he somehow seen what I just did, he would have understood.
The afternoon moved on and we drank wine and watched shadows change on the ceiling as the sun got weary of the day. When the phone rang, I didn’t answer it. When Marino thumped on the door and called out to me, I pretended no one was home. When the phone rang again, I shook my head.
“Marino, Marino,” I said.
“Your bodyguard.”
“He didn’t do a very good job this time,” I said as Talley fit as much of me into his mouth as he could. “I suppose I’ll have to fire him.”
“I wish you would.”
“Tell me I haven’t committed yet another felony this day. And that your name, Agent Talley, has nothing to do with keeping score.”
“Okay. My name has nothing to do with keeping score. But I don’t know about the felony part.”
It seemed that Marino gave up on me, and as it got dark, Talley and I took a shower together. He washed my hair and made a joke about the age difference between us. He said it was another example of his being contraire. I said we should go to dinner.
“What about the Café Runtz?” he asked.
“What about it?”
“What the French would call chaleureux, ancien et familial—warm, old, familiar. The Opéra-Comique is next door, so there are photographs of opera singers all over the walls.”
I thought of Marino. I needed to let him know I was not lost somewhere in Paris.
“It’s a nice walk,” Talley was saying. “Maybe only fifteen minutes. Twenty at the most.”
“I need to find Marino first,” I said. “He’s probably in the bar.”
“Would you like me to look for him and send him up?”
“I’m sure he would be most appreciative,” I said facetiously.
Marino found me before Talley found him. I was still drying my hair when Marino showed up at my door, and the look on his face told me he knew why he had not been able to reach me.
“Where the hell you been?” he asked as he walked in.
“The Institut Médico-Légal.”
“All day?”
“No, not all day,” I said.
Marino looked at the bed. Talley and I had made it, but it didn’t look quite the way the housekeepers had left it this morning.
“I’m going out to . . .” I started to say.
“With him,” Marino raised his voice. “I goddamn knew this would happen. I can’t believe you fell for it. Je-sus Christ. I thought you was above . . .”
“Marino, this is none of your business,” I wearily said.
He blocked the door, hands on his hips like a stern nanny. He looked so ridiculous, I had to laugh.
“What’s the matter with you?” he exclaimed. “One minute you’re looking at Benton’s autopsy report and the next you’re screwing around with some playboy, snotty, stuck-on-himself kid! You couldn’t even wait twenty-four hours, Doc! How could you do that to Benton?”
“Marino, for God’s sake keep your voice down. There’s been quite enough yelling in this room.”
“How could you?” He looked at me with disgust, as if I were a whore. “You just get his letter and have me and Lucy over and then last night you’re sitting here crying. And what? None of it happened? You just start all over like nothing happened? With some womanizing punk?”
“Please leave my room.” I’d had enough.
“Oh, no.” He began to pace, wagging his finger at me. “Oh, no. I ain’t going nowhere. You want to fuck around with pretty boy, you can just do it in front of me. ’Cause guess why? I’m not gonna let it happen. Someone’s got to do the right thing here, and looks like it’s gonna be me.”
He paced and paced, getting more livid with each word.
“It’s not about your letting or not letting something happen.” My fury was gathering. “Who the hell do you think you are, Marino? Stay out of my life.”
“Well, poor Benton. A damn good thing he’s dead, huh? Shows how much you loved him, all right.”
He stopped pacing and jabbed his finger at my face.
“And I thought you was different! What was you doing when Benton wasn’t looking? That’s what I want to know! And all this time I’m feeling sorry for you!”
“Get out of my room now.” My self-control snapped. “You goddamn jealous son of a bitch! How dare you even allude to my relationship with Benton. What do you know? Nothing, Marino. He’s dead, Marino. He’s been dead for over a year, Marino. And I’m not dead and you’re not dead.”
“Well, right now I wish you was.”
“You sound like Lucy when she was ten.”
He stalked out and slammed the door so hard paintings shifted on the wall and the chandelier shook. I picked up the phone and called the front desk.
“Is there a Jay Talley in the lobby?” I asked. “Tall, dark, young. Wearing a beige leather jacket, jeans?”
“Yes, I see him, madame.”
Seconds later Talley was on the phone.
“Marino just stormed out of here,” I said. “Don’t let him see you, Jay. He’s crazy.”
“Actually, he’s just getting off the elevator now. And you’re right. He looks a little crazy. Gotta go.”
I ran out of my room. I ran as fast as I could through the corridor and down the winding, carpeted steps, ignoring the odd stares I got from well-dressed, civilized people who walked at a leisurely pace and didn’t get into fistfights in the Grand Hôtel in Paris. I slowed down when I reached the lobby, lungs burning and out of breath, and to my horror watched Marino taking swings at Talley while two bell-men and a valet tried to intervene. A man at the registration desk frantically dialed the phone, probably calling the police.
“Marino, no!” I said loudly and with authority as I hurried over to him. “Marino, no!” I grabbed his arm.
He was glassy-eyed and sweating profusely, and thank God he had no gun because I was afraid he might have used it just then. I kept hold of his arm while Talley talked in French and gestured, assuring everyone there was no problem and not to call the police. I led Marino by the hand through the lobby like a mother about to discipline a very bad little boy. I escorted him past valets and expensive cars and out onto the sidewalk, where I stopped.
“Do you have any idea what you’re doing?” I asked him.
He wiped his face on the back of his hand. He was breathing so hard he was wheezing. It occurred to me he might have a heart attack.
“Marino.” I shook his arm. “Listen to me. What you just did in there is unconscionable. Talley has done nothing to you. I’ve done nothing to you.”
“Maybe I’m sticking up for Benton ’cause he ain’t here to do it himself,” Marino said in a flat, worn-out voice.
“No. You were throwing punches at Carrie Grethen, at Joyce. It’s them you want to beat up, maim, kill.”
He took deep, defeated breaths.
“Don’t you think I know what you’re doing?” I went on in an intense, quiet voice.
People were shadows drifting past us on the sidewalk. Light spilled out of brasseries and cafés that were having busy nights, their small outdoor tables full.
“You have to take it out on someone,” I went on. “That’s the way it works. And who is there to go after? Carrie and Joyce are dead.”
“At least you and Lucy got to kill the motherfuckers. Shoot their goddamn asses out of the air.” Marino began to sob.
“Come on,” I said.
I took his arm in mine and we started walking.
“I had nothing to do with killing them,” I said. “Not that I would have hesitated, Marino. But Lucy pulled the trigger. And you know what? She doesn’t feel the better for it. She still hates and simmers and beats and shoots her way through life. She’ll have her day of reckoning, too. And this is yours. Let it go.”
“Why did’ya have to go and do that with him?” he asked in a small, pained voice as he wiped his eyes on his sleeve. “How come, Doc? Why him?”
“There’s no one good enough for me, is that it?” I said.
He had to think about that.
“And there’s no one good enough for you. No one as good as Doris. When she divorced you, that was hard, wasn’t it? And I’ve never thought any woman you’ve been with since is even close to what she was. But we have to try, Marino. We have to live.”
“Yeah, and they all dumped me, too. Those women who ain’t good enough for me.”
“They dumped you because they’re bowling-alley bimbos.”
He smiled in the dark.