He was deeply asleep when the door chimes rang. He opened his eyes and for a long moment he couldn’t think where he was, or what had happened to him, or even who he was.
He was lying on a chestnut-brown couch in a large rustic-style living-room. An empty red-wine bottle stood on the glass-topped table close by, with three wine-flecked glasses. On the brick-effect wall above the cabin-style fireplace hung a huge oil painting of Red Indians riding through a blizzard. It was entitled Winter in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.
The doorbells chimed again. He sat up, and tried to rub his eyes, but found that his hands were thickly bound in clean bandages, like a boxer. He was wearing nothing but his boxer shorts. He looked around him, and saw his shirt neatly folded over the back of the chestnut-brown armchair opposite. It was only when he heard Kathleen calling from upstairs, ‘Lloyd! Could you get the door please?’ that he remembered exactly where he was.
He tugged on his pants and held them together with one hand because he couldn’t fasten the button with his bandaged fingers. The dark wobbly shape of a man in a blue suit was visible through the hammered glass door. Using his hand like a big white lobster-claw, Lloyd opened the door on the chain and said, ‘Who is it?’
The man turned around. It was Sergeant Houk. A little further away stood Detective Gable, with his hands in his pockets, whistling to himself. In the driveway, parked alongside Lloyd’s burned and scraped BMW, stood Sergeant’s Houk’s Buick, and behind it, a blue-and-white squad car from the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department, with a pale-faced young deputy sitting in it.
‘Do you mind if we come in, or are we interrupting something?’ asked Sergeant Houk.
Lloyd released the chain. ‘Surprised you knew where to find me.’
‘We didn’t know where to find you, as a matter of fact. We put out a county-wide bulletin for your car last night, and that smart young deputy happened to notice it in Mrs Kerwin’s driveway first thing this morning, and called us. There can’t be too many white BMWs in Southern California with the licence FISHEE.’
As he stepped into the house, he looked back at Lloyd’s car and commented, ‘Pretty beat up, too. Hope you’re not thinking of driving it on the highway in that condition.’
‘I had a slight accident,’ said Lloyd, trying to push the button of his pants through the buttonhole with the heel of his hand.
‘You’re not kidding. Was that how you hurt your hands?’
‘That’s right, burned them. It’s not too serious. More blisters than anything else.’
Sergeant Houk walked into the living-room and looked around at the couch with its scrumpled-up cushions and its dragged-aside blanket, the empty bottle of wine, the three glasses. ‘I didn’t know that you and Mrs Kerwin were old acquaintances,’ he remarked.
‘We’re not. We only met yesterday.’
‘Impolite to ask you how?’
‘Of course not. I went out to the Anza Borrego Desert to look at that burned-out bus, and Mrs Kerwin was there, tying on a wreath, in memory of her husband.’
Sergeant Houk nodded. ‘Any particular reason you went out to look at that burned-out bus?’
‘Celia was a member of the San Diego Opera, so was Marianna Gomes. I guess it struck me as something of a coincidence that both of them had burned to death within two days of each other.’
‘So you went to look at the burned-out bus?’
‘Yes, that’s right.’
Sergeant Houk stood in the centre of the living-room with his arms folded, making a show of thinking. ‘Can I ask you what you thought you might find, if you went to look at the burned-out bus?’
‘I don’t know. Some kind of clue why Celia might have committed suicide.’
‘Oh! And did you?’ asked Sergeant Houk.
‘Did I what?’
‘Did you find any clues why Celia might have committed suicide?’
Lloyd gave a small, uncommunicative shake of his head. ‘I guess I didn’t.’
‘But you did find Mrs Kerwin? Just by chance?’
‘That’s right. We got talking. In the end, I asked her to come back to La Jolla with me for dinner.’
‘At your own restaurant, I presume?’
‘That’s right. We ate pretty early, as a matter of fact. But Mrs Kerwin seemed to be tired, so I suggested that she leave her car in the parking-lot and come back to my place for a nightcap.’
Sergeant Houk sniffed. ‘With what intention?’
‘I don’t follow you.’
‘What I’m trying to get at, Mr Denman, is what you had in mind when you invited Mrs Kerwin back to your house? Was it just for a drink, or did you have something more serious in mind?’
Lloyd stared at him indignantly. ‘Are you sick in the head, or what? Both of us had just lost people we loved in the most horrible way you can think of. And you’re trying to suggest that I asked Mrs Kerwin back to my house so that I could seduce her?’
Sergeant Houk was unfazed. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Denman, I was simply trying to assess the degree of your intimacy with Mrs Kerwin. For all I know, you and Mrs Kerwin might have been acquaintances before these burning occurred.’
‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’
‘I’m asking you.’
‘You’re not suggesting that I could have burned that bus?’
Sergeant Houk shrugged as if, well, it was possible sure, now that you came to mention it. ‘You see the difficulty we have here is why Mr Kerwin was riding that bus at all. Or why any of the passengers were riding it. It was chartered by somebody calling himself Jim Ortal, and it was supposed to be a tour by the El Cajon Astronomical Society to visit Mount Palomar Observatory. Of course there is no El Cajon Astronomical Society and there is nobody with the name Ortal at the address that was given. The deposit on the bus and one day’s rental plus full insurance was paid in advance in cash, so there’s no bank account number and no credit card billing address.’
At that moment, Kathleen’s older sister Lucy came downstairs in her black gingham robe, closely followed by a nine-year-old boy with dark hair and dark circles under his eyes. Lloyd had met Lucy and Tom late last night, when they had returned from visiting Lucy and Kathleen’s parents in Rancho Bernardo. Kathleen had said nothing to Lucy about the unwelcome visit from Otto and Helmwige, and Lloyd had explained the devastated condition of his car by telling her that he had misjudged the turning into the drive, struck the garden wall, and that the car’s fuel hose had fractured and started a fire. Lucy seemed to have believed him, and Tom had thought that any man who could cause such spectacular damage just by turning into somebody’s drive was practically a superhero. And wreck a $65,000 BMW, too!
Lucy looked very much like Kathleen, only thinner and drier-skinned and more deeply suntanned, and she had acquired a slower Western drawl from all her years in Arizona. ‘Kathleen’ll be down in a minute,’ she said. ‘Have these gentlemen come about your accident?’
‘That’s right, ma’am,’ grinned Sergeant Houk. ‘Sorry to disturb you so early.’
‘Don’t concern yourself,’ Lucy replied. ‘Would you care for some coffee?’
‘Black, please,’ said Detective Gable.
‘We won’t. Thank you,’ said Sergeant Houk. ‘We’re kind of pressed for time.’
‘Lloyd?’ asked Lucy.
‘Yes, black please, Lucy,’ Lloyd told her. Sergeant Houk was beginning to make him feel cornered, and he was glad of a momentary interruption. He didn’t want to tell Sergeant Houk anything about Otto and Helmwige, not yet, not until he understood what Otto and Helmwige were actually into, and what was going to happen when Celia was ‘transformed’. He could imagine far too vividly the police bursting into the house on Paseo Delicias and arresting everybody in sight, and condemning Celia for ever to that strange grey-faced state in which he had seen her last night.
Lloyd’s whole night had been haunted by echoing, flaring nightmares. He had glimpsed Celia again and again, behind reflecting shop doors, on the opposite side of the street, on bridges, in the rain, masked by the windows of passing cars. He couldn’t logically believe that she was still alive, in any shape, in any form. But he had seen her with his waking eyes and all he could do was to force himself to suspend his disbelief, to open his mind to any possibility, no matter how strange, no matter how grotesque.
It upset him that she was still in the hands of Otto and Helmwige, but in the end he supposed that there was no alternative for her. Even if they had originally been responsible for her burning herself (and by God he would kill them with his bare hands if he found out that they were), Otto and Helmwige had somehow raised her from the dead. He had to trust them to complete their ritual of ‘transformation’, whatever that was. If that was the only way in which Celia could be whole again, he couldn’t interfere.
Sergeant Houk paced across to the fireplace and examined the oil-painting of Red Indians in the snow as closely as if it were a Van Dyck. ‘Nice picture’ he remarked.
‘Not exactly my taste,’ Lloyd told him.
‘Oh, yes. I’ve seen your restaurant. You’re more into what d’you-call-’em, Depressionists.’
‘Impressionists.’
‘Whatever. They may impress you but they depress the hell out of me.’
Lloyd said tautly, ‘If it sets your mind at rest, I never met Mrs Kerwin before yesterday, and the only reason I went out to the desert was because I wanted to take a look at the bus. Morbid interest, I guess.’
‘Well, I’d say that hits the nail on the head,’ Sergeant Houk replied. ‘Morbid interest, Mr Denman, that’s what you’ve got. But a very special variety of morbid interest.’
‘I don’t think I know what you’re talking about.’
‘You don’t think you know what I’m talking about?’ queried Sergeant Houk. He lifted one hand, and began to count items on his fingers. ‘Your fiancée burns to death in the parking lot of McDonald’s. You meet with Sylvia Cuddy of the San Diego Opera and then she burns to death in her apartment. You talk to Robert Tuggey, a short-order chef at McDonald’s, and he dies in an unexplained fire in his automobile, in the same parking lot where your fiancée died. You visit the wreck of a burned-out bus, in which an acquaintance of yours from the San Diego Opera was killed. The same night, your house is seriously damaged by fire, and you and the widow of another victim of the burned-out bus are seen driving away from the scene of the fire with the interior of your car apparently in flames. This morning I arrive to find not only the interior of your car damaged by fire, but the tyres burned, too.’
Sergeant Houk had only a couple of fingers left to count on. ‘Mr Denman,’ he said, ‘wouldn’t you say that all of those incidents would lead a reasonable person to believe that you had a morbid interest in fire?’
Lloyd opened his mouth, then closed it again. Sergeant Houk had obviously spent all night trying to build a circumstantial case against him, but whatever he said, it would only make matters more difficult.
‘You’re not going to arrest me, are you?’ he asked.
‘No, sir, I’m not going to arrest you. I just wanted you to know how things look from our point of view.’
‘I think I’d better speak to my lawyer,’ said Lloyd.
‘All right,’ nodded Sergeant Houk. ‘That’s your privilege.’
Lloyd said, ‘Let me tell you this, though. Whatever it looks like from your point of view, you’re wrong. You’re way off beam. I wasn’t responsible for any of those deaths or any of those fires, and by the time this is over, you’re going to find that out for yourself, and you’re going to knock on my door the same way you did this morning, and you’re going to have to say that you’re sorry.’
‘Be my pleasure,’ grinned Sergeant Houk. ‘Come on, detective, I think that’s enough for now.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Detective Gable, without taking his eyes off the tray of coffee that Lucy was carrying into the room.
‘You’re going so soon?’ Lucy asked them.
‘I think we have everything we need, thank you, ma’am,’ said Sergeant Houk.
Lloyd showed them to the door, and opened it.
‘Oh, by the way,’ Sergeant Houk said, as if it had only just occurred to him. ‘Did you by chance visit a house yesterday morning on Paseo Delicias, at Rancho Santa Fe? When we put out the APB on your car last night, an officer from White Shield Security called in to say that he’d seen a white BMW with the licence plate FISHEE out on Paseo Delicias yesterday morning. He’d also seen a man answering your description entering the property in a manner that made him look twice.’
Lloyd felt a tightness in his chest. The last thing he wanted was for Sergeant Houk to call at Otto’s house. ‘I’m sorry, I can’t help you,’ he replied.
‘You mean you weren’t there?’
‘I mean the security officer must have been mistaken. I told you where I was yesterday, out in the Anza Borrego.’
‘Well . . . just asking,’ Sergeant Houk smiled. ‘Have you been back to your house yet?’
Lloyd shook his head. ‘I was planning on calling my neighbour to find out how bad it was damaged.’
Sergeant Houk sniffed. ‘It wasn’t as serious as it might have been, that’s what the fire chief told me. Apparently the back roof collapsed, and the kitchen’s burned out, but the main structure is still safe. You were lucky the firefighters got there so quick.’
He turned to leave, but then he hesitated and said, ‘You’ll stick around, won’t you? And you’ll let me know where I can get in touch?’
‘Is that because I’m a suspect?’ asked Lloyd.
‘It’s because I don’t want to have to put out a countywide APB every time I want to ask you a couple of questions, okay? Is that reasonable?’
Lloyd nodded, and closed the door. As an afterthought, he slid the security-chain into place.
Kathleen came down, wearing jeans and a plain white blouse. ‘What was that all about?’ she asked him.
‘Just questions,’ said Lloyd. ‘He seems to have got it into his head that you and I might have planned to burn that bus so that we could collect your husband’s insurance and run off to Acapulco together.’
‘You’re not serious!’
Lloyd swallowed coffee. ‘Almost. But that doesn’t worry me. We didn’t do it, and he can’t produce any evidence that we did. What does worry me is that he knows where I went yesterday morning.’
‘You mean to Otto’s house?’ Kathleen asked.
‘That’s right. And he’s enough of a keen detective to try checking it out.’
‘Oh, God. Otto will think that you tipped him off, won’t he?’
Lloyd said, ‘That possibility had occurred to me. And Otto isn’t exactly your genial, forgiving type, is he? With any luck, he might allow me one last look at the world, like that cicada.’
‘What can we do?’ asked Kathleen.
Lloyd shrugged. ‘Nothing. Have breakfast. Hope for the best.’
‘Piove sul bagnato,’ said Kathleen. ‘It never rains but it pours.’ When she caught Lloyd’s quizzical look, she smiled gently and said, ‘I used to have an Italian boyfriend once. Trouble is, I didn’t fancy the idea of competing with a two-hundred-and-twenty-five-pound arm-wrestler for the rest of my life.’
‘He was an arm-wrestler?’
‘I’m talking about his mother.’
Sergeant Houk drew up underneath the overhanging eucalyptus trees on Paseo Delicias and switched off his engine. ‘That’s the house,’ he told Detective Gable. ‘Look at all those goddamned Mercedes. It looks like Hitler’s garage.’
The deputy’s car drew up behind them, and the deputy came up and leaned on the roof of Sergeant’s Houk’s Buick, next to the open window, and flipped his notebook. ‘The sheriff just came through on the radio. The property is owned by Matt Orwell, the movie producer, and rented through Rand and Stewart, of Rancho Santa Fe. The present renter is the Salamander Corporation, registered in Butte, Montana. The rental documents were signed on behalf of the corporation by Mr J. Ortal.’
‘Bingo!’ breathed Sergeant Houk. ‘And what’s the betting that Mr J. Ortal turns out to be Mr L. Denman?’
‘You seriously think that Denman burned that bus?’ asked Detective Gable, taking off his sunglasses and hooking them into his shirt. ‘He don’t seem like the type to me.’
‘Type, will you listen to him?’ mocked Sergeant Houk. ‘Did you ever see a single perpetrator who ever ran true to type? Type is for the movies. This guy Denman is a pyromaniac. You know? He loves to see things burn.’
‘That still doesn’t mean that he burned the bus,’ Detective Gable insisted.
Sergeant Houk sighed. ‘Let me suggest a scenario, right? Denman meets Mrs Kerwin at his restaurant one evening, very romantic, they flirt, etcetera, ectetera, they date, eventually they fall in love. Come on, he’s a reasonable-looking guy and she’s a pretty reasonable-looking woman, and one thing we know about Mr Michael Kerwin is that he was away most of the week on business. Between the two of them Denman and Mrs Kerwin work out this plan to kill off his fiancée and her husband. Denman used to work in insurance, remember, he must know all the wrinkles. It’s Double Indemnity all over again.’
‘But why did they fry a whole busload of people, just to nail this one guy?’ Detective Gable asked him, looking more like Jackie Gleason than ever. His hair was frizzy and wild, and there were clear beads of perspiration on his upper lip.
‘It’s been heard of before,’ the young deputy remarked, trying to sound experienced and professional. ‘You remember that case when a guy bombed an entire airplane, just to collect his mother’s insurance? A hundred innocent passengers blown out of the sky, and for what? Just to get rid of one person. Hard case to solve, too: you’ve got scores of suspects, and as many motives as there are passengers.’
‘Yes,’ said Sergeant Houk, caustically, ‘I saw that movie too.’
Detective Gable wiped his forehead with his sleeve. ‘So what are we going to do? Are we going to go in there, or what?’
‘Of course we’re going to go in there,’ Sergeant Houk told him, with exaggerated patience. ‘You know what my motto is, “No Stone Unturned”. Maybe Denman didn’t do it. But maybe he did. Maybe he’s Ortal and maybe he isn’t. But we’re not going to find out by sitting on our rear ends.’
He climbed out of the car, and combed his hair. Then he said, ‘Let’s go,’ and they went.
They negotiated the interlocked maze of closely-parked Mercedes, and Sergeant Houk admired each one in turn. ‘Beautiful, beautiful. Clean them up, and they’d be worth a fortune. You see that one, that tourer? One point five, easy.’
‘Pretty small engine for a car that size,’ Detective Gable remarked.
‘Engine? Who’s talking about engines? One point five million, at auction. They sold one at Christie’s just like it.’
They climbed the broken steps to the verandah. ‘Don’t know how much Orwell charges for this dump, but it’s got to be too much,’ Sergeant Houk remarked. ‘Have you seen the prices around here? Three quarters of a million for a three-bedroom home, and a view of what?’
They reached the door. The lizard doorknocker hung in front of them heavy and fat and black, more like a flaccid overripe fruit than a doorknocker cast out of brass. Sergeant Houk took a look along the verandah, at the broken boards, at the grimy windows. ‘Place looks deserted to me. Deputy—why’nt you scout round the back—see what you can see? But be careful what you do. Don’t touch anything, even if it looks like evidence. Especially if it looks like evidence. We don’t have a warrant.’
He took hold of the knocker and clapped it forcefully against the door. It startled a brace of California quail on the roof-ridge, and sent them fluttering into the bright morning sky.
‘Nobody here, Sergeant,’ the deputy called back, as he reached the end of the verandah.
Detective Gable looked this way and that, as if he were trying to cross the street. ‘You know something, Sergeant, this case is totally weird. This is the weirdest damned case I ever handled.’
Sergeant Houk shook his head. ‘This case isn’t weird. There’s nothing weird about it at all. The perpetrator wants us to believe it’s weird, that’s all, to throw us off. A woman burns herself to death in a parking lot. A bus-load of people burn themselves to death in the desert. A woman gets burned in her apartment, a McDonald’s chef gets burned in his car. It’s not weird, Gable, it’s just death, and death is death no matter how it happens. You wouldn’t think it was weird if they were shot, or stabbed, or strangled.’
‘Well, I know. But I still think it’s weird.’
Sergeant Houk knocked again, but the front door remained adamantly closed. The deputy came back along the verandah, his boot-heels making a hollow rocking noise, his thumbs wedged into his belt.
‘Okay, Matt Dillon. Go check the back,’ Sergeant Houk instructed him.
‘The name’s Roger,’ the deputy replied, somewhat put out.
‘Okay, Roger, sorry Roger, go check the back, Roger.’
The deputy skirted the garage and timidly fought his way through the overgrown weeds, using his gun-barrel to push aside the thistles. Sergeant Houk watched him go with the expression of a man who had to learn patience the hard way.
‘All right,’ he said, at last. ‘Let’s give this doorknocker one last workout.’ He banged it seven times, grotesquely loudly, and Detective Gable winced every time.
‘If they don’t answer that, they’re either out, or dead,’ said Sergeant Houk.
They waited and waited. ‘Nobody in, said Detective Gable. But as he did so, the front door suddenly unlatched itself and swung open, and there stood Helmwige, tightly swaddled in a bronze silk bathrobe, with a towel tied around her head.
‘Yes?’ she said, as if she hadn’t heard Sergeant Houk beating at the door as if it were the Gates of Hell.
Caught off-balance, Sergeant Houk dropped his badge. As he bent down to retrieve it, he saw that Helmwige was wearing heavy silver anklets. ‘I’m sorry to disturb you. We’re investigating a series of homicides in the San Diego area. I was wondering if I could ask you some questions.’
Helmwige blinked at him with spiky wet eyelashes. ‘What could I possibly know about homicides?’
Sergeant Houk coughed. ‘I’m not suggesting that you know anything about them directly, ma’am. It’s just that you may be able to assist the investigation by clearing up a couple of peripheral queries.’
Helmwige said nothing. Sergeant Houk wasn’t at all sure that she had understood him.
‘For instance,’ he ventured, ‘do you happen to be acquainted with a man called Lloyd Denman? He owns a fancy fish restaurant at La Jolla. Tall guy, thin, kind of aquiline nose.’
‘Beaky,’ added Detective Gable, when Helmwige still failed to respond.
Helmwige, without taking her eyes off them, called, ‘Otto! Kommen Sie hier, bitte!’
After another lengthy pause, during which Helmwige stared back at Sergeant Houk and Detective Gable without volunteering a single word, Otto appeared from what was obviously the kitchen door at the back. He was wearing a white T-shirt and voluminous grey cotton shorts, which made him look even thinner and paler and more dried-out than ever. He was wiping his hands on a small threadbare towel, over and over and over.
Helmwige said, ‘These gentlemen are detectives. They want to know if we have heard of anybody named—what was it, Detective?’
‘Sergeant,’ Sergeant Houk correct her. ‘And the name of the man I was asking you about is Lloyd Denman.’
Otto inspected Sergeant Houk and Detective Gable with cold yellowish-grey eyes. He continued to rub his hands as if he were obsessive about having them completely dry. ‘Why should you ask us this?’ he wanted to know.
‘Well, sir,’ said Sergeant Houk. ‘We’re investigating a number of homicides . . . you may have heard about them, a whole lot of people in the San Diego area have been burned to death . . . and Mr Denman happens to be a suspect in this case.’
‘A suspect?’ asked Otto, and then nodded.
‘Do you know him?’ repeated Detective Gable.
Otto pursed his lips dismissively, and shook his head. ‘Nein. Ich kenne ihn nicht.’
Sergeant Houk opened his notebook. ‘He was supposed to have visited these premises yesterday morning, round about eleven o’clock.’
‘Das ist ganz unmöglich,’ Otto replied.
‘What’d he say?’ Sergeant Houk asked Helmwige.
‘He said, it is not possible.’
‘He was seen entering these premises, sir.’ Then, to Helmwige, ‘Tell him that Lloyd Denman was seen entering these premises.’
‘Have you seen this man Denman?’ Otto asked him, unexpectedly, in English.
‘Sure I’ve seen him,’ said Sergeant Houk guardedly. ‘I saw him about a half-hour since. And if you can speak English, why the hell have we been . . .’
He was interrupted by a splintering of glass from the back of the house, which sounded distinctly like a young deputy sheriff putting his boot-heel through a cucumber-frame. Otto’s eyes instantly flared wide open, and he hissed at Sergeant Houk, ‘You have sent somebody around to the back of the house?’
‘Well, yes, I’m sorry, but we didn’t think there was anybody here and we were just checking to make sure that . . .’
‘You have a warrant?’
‘Not specifically as such, but . . .’
‘Who knows you are here? Which of your superiors? Which of your colleagues?’
‘Sir—we weren’t sent by anybody—this happens to be part of an ongoing investigation, that’s all . . . and if that deputy has damaged anything . . .’
But Otto turned away from him, opened the kitchen door, and disappeared. Sergeant Houk said to Helmwige, ‘Listen—I didn’t intend to cause any problems here, but . . .’
Without a word, her face grim, Helmwige slammed the door. Sergeant Houk and Detective Gable were left standing on the verandah.
Didn’t I tell you this case was weird?’ said Detective Gable, hitching up his trousers.
‘If I had a goddamned warrant I’d bust in there like fifteen tons of hot shit,’ Sergeant Houk snarled. ‘Goddamned Krauts. Just because we beat the shit out of them during the war, they seem to think we owe them some kind of apology.’
‘Well, how can they expect that?’ said Detective Gable. ‘We weren’t even born during the war.’
‘Oh God give me strength,’ Sergeant Houk retaliated.
At that moment, they heard an appalling high-pitched scream. It sounded like a bird at first, or a coyote caught in a gin-trap. But it was quickly followed by another, more like a bellow of pain than a scream, and then a shout of ‘Help me! Help me! Aaaahhh! Help me!’
Sergeant Houk slapped Detective Gable on the shoulder and snapped, ‘Round the back! Quick! You go that way, I’ll go this!’
They both drew their guns. Detective Gable jumped heavily off the verandah and ran around the garage block, battling with the weeds as he went. Sergeant Houk sprinted along the verandah, round the other side of the house, and with a fierce kick broke the latch of the whitewashed wooden gate at the side. He forced the gate wider, pushed himself through, and galloped up a flight of six or seven shallow brick steps to the back corner of the house. He caught his foot in a loosely-coiled garden hose; tripped, took three flying, loping, off-balance steps forward, and grazed his hand against the path.
The screaming went on, almost inhuman. As he came around the corner to the small back yard, Sergeant Houk saw the deputy engulfed in roaring flames, flapping at himself in a convulsive attempt to put them out. His arms jerked up and down like a clockwork toy, but all he was doing was fanning the flames even more. His eyes were squeezed shut. Both his ears were alight, shrivelling like radicchio leaves on a kitchen burner. Fire poured from the top of his head, sending up a column of black smoke that rose higher than the house.
Detective Gable appeared on the other side of the house, fighting aside the last of the weeds. He stopped and stared at the deputy in open-mouthed horror.
‘Your coat, Gable, for Christ’s sake!’ yelled Sergeant Houk. ‘Use your coat!’
He looked desperately around. How the hell do you extinguish a burning man? There was a swimming-pool in the yard, but it had obviously long been empty, and was peeling and cracked and silted up with dry eucalyptus leaves. The rest of the yard was mainly concrete, with a few sorry yuccas, a tangled flower border, and a glass vegetable frame hidden amongst the overgrown crabgrass.
The garden hose!
The deputy was still flapping, still dancing. Detective Gable had twisted himself out of his coat and was waving it at him like a matador, trying to get near enough the blazing deputy to smother the flames. Sergeant Houk ran back to the garden hose. The tap was stiff, but he hit it twice with the butt of his revolver, and it loosened.
Hurry, Christ, hurry, the man’s on fire!
But all the time he knew that he was far too late, that it was no goddamned use, and that it would probably be kinder to let the deputy die. But he had been trained not to respond to thoughts like that. It was his duty to do what he could to save the deputy’s life, human sympathy notwithstanding.
The hose was faded and inflexible from years of lying in the sun, and hideously knotted, but he managed to yank enough of it across the yard to reach the burning man. Water clattered on the dry ground all around him.
The deputy had fallen on to his side now, amongst the grass and the broken glass, and was shuddering and quaking in agony. Detective Gable was on his knees beside him, trying desperately to cover him up with his coat, but every time he moved the coat to suppress the flames that danced around his face, more flames would spring up around his thighs and his groin.
‘Oh God!’ whimpered Detective Gable, his own hands reddened and blistered. ‘He’s like one of those fucking candles you can’t blow out!’
‘Roger!’ Sergeant Houk shouted. ‘Roger, you hear me? It’s okay! Get ready for a shock! This water’s real cold!’
He couldn’t tell whether the deputy had understood him or not. The boy’s face was blackened like burned beef, his eyes had been poached into blindness, his hair was nothing but crisp black tufts. But somehow he was still alive, still hurting, still burning, still trembling in the very last moments of his life.
Sergeant Houk swung the hose around and drenched him.
Detective Gable heaved himself up, offering his own burned hands to the hosepipe jet, and saying, ‘Here, Sergeant, for Christ’s sake, just one splash.’
The second he said that, however, Sergeant Houk saw with horror that the hose hadn’t extinguished the deputy at all. In fact, the flames were roaring up even more furiously, as if the water itself were flammable. He was about to say, ‘Gable, no . . .!’ when the arc of water pouring out of the hose-nozzle burst into flame, and Detective Gable was drenched in fire.
Detective Gable screeched, and tried to wave away the fire with his arms, but his arms instantly caught alight. The hose almost immediately became too hot for Sergeant Houk to hold, and he dropped it. It snaked backwards and forwards under the wild pressure of the fluid, spraying Detective Gable again and again with liquid fire.
He fell to the ground, rolled over, thrashed, but he was burning even more fiercely than the deputy.
‘Daddy!’ he screamed. ‘Daddy! For Christ’s sake, Daddy!’
This time Sergeant Houk knew that the time for the rulebook had passed. He dodged the cascade of fire from the hose, and stepped up to Detective Gable quick and intent, his muscles tense as springs. He was holding his service revolver in both hands.
‘God forgive me,’ he said, and shot Detective Gable once in the head. Blood and brains sprayed outwards, and sizzled sharply in the heat.
Then Sergeant Houk turned around, his gun raised, and saw Otto standing at the kitchen window, his face white white white, his dry hands raised over his eyes as if he were staring at something very far in the distance. Helmwige stood a little further back in the shadows, but she wasn’t even looking at the burning men in her back yard, she was admiring her fingernails.
Sergeant Houk pointed his gun stiffly at Otto and screamed, ‘Freeze! Freeze, you bastard! You’re under arrest!’
But instantly he felt a wave of heat roar over him, as if a huge furnace door had been opened right in front of his face. His hands blistered, his sleeve caught fire, his gun fired on its own, smashing the kitchen window. Instinctively, he threw the gun away, a split-second before the rest of its rounds exploded in the chamber, blasting fragments of shrapnel in all directions. One of them caught Sergeant Houk deep in his left-calf muscle.
You bastard! he thought. You won’t burn me!
With his clothes alight, with his hair smoking, he ran back around the house, leaping over the hose, thundering along the verandah, vaulting the porch, and hurdling the long guano-spattered hood of Otto’s Mercedes tourer.
He didn’t notice the pain at first, but when his hair suddenly flared up, he felt a searing sensation on the top of his head that made him yell out. He had to get away! He had to get away!
His trousers were blazing, his shirt was almost completely burned off his back. Nylon was fused into skin, man-made fibre into man, until it was impossible even to separate them again. His shoes fell away from his feet in burning chunks, then the soles of his feet were torn off, with two sharp ripping noises, as his skin was fused to the blacktop.
He heard his breath coming in huge, Channel-swimmer’s roars. He saw the road ahead of him, juggled in his vision like the view through a hand-held camera. He saw the eucalyptus trees swaying, although he couldn’t hear them rustle. He saw his Buick, parked and ready for him, ready to take him away. He smelled fire, and smoke, and some indescribable odour that was himself, burning.
‘You . . . Kraut . . . bastard . . . you . . . won’t . . .’
He reached his car, tugged open the driver’s door with fingers that seemed to be dripping flesh.
Won’t . . . burn . . . me . . . you . . .
His coat was gone, his shirt was gone. His torso was a mass of reddened flesh, on which small well-fed flames still licked. But he still had his car keys, embedded in his skin. With fingers that were tipped with nothing but bone, he prized the keys out of the blistered layers, pulling even more skin after them. He screamed in despair more than in pain.
‘You won’t burn me you bastard!’ he shouted. He rammed the key into the Buick’s ignition and the end of the key penetrated the palm of his hand, wedging itself right between his finger-bones. Still shouting, still blazing, he turned his hand so that the engine started, yanked the parking-brake, and skidded away from the side of the road in a blizzard of eucalyptus leaves and a cloud of dust. A Mexican gardener was raking the lawns of the house on the opposite side of Paseo Delicias. He turned around in horror as Sergeant Houk’s Buick slewed past him, tyres shrieking like a chorus from Tannhäuser, with a man on fire in the driver’s seat. The gardener dropped to his knees and crossed himself.
Swerving the Buick around the next bend, Sergeant Houk knew that it was over. His legs were still alight, his scalp was tightening and shrivelling like a bathing-cap. The pain was already so intense that he didn’t know whether he could still feel it or not. It was like being eaten, rather than burned.
Ahead of him, up the winding hill of Paseo Delicias, he could see a huge blue-and-white truck toiling. Genuine GM Auto Parts.
Thank you, God, he thought to himself. So you have forgiven me, after all.
Behind the next embankment, he saw the top of the truck approaching. He pressed his foot as far down on the accelerator as he could, and wildly steered the Buick on to the lefthand side of the road.
He saw lemon trees passing, like trees in a dream. He saw rocks, bushes, fragments of sky, everything floating past him so gently and so normally, with the rocking motion of a carousel. He remembered the carousel at Disneyland, when he was a kid, floating up and down, up and down. But his tyres were still singing their merciless chorus, somewhere on the edge of his consciousness. Fearful and loud thy rage is! Like a storm-wind you come!
He opened his mouth to say something, but then his entire windshield was filled with the massive chrome radiator grille of the oncoming truck.
The Buick hit the truck at a closing speed of over seventy miles an hour. Its front end dived under the truck’s front bumper, and the entire car vanished underneath the truck as if it had never existed. The truck driver didn’t have the time to blow his horn.
Only a second afterward, however, the Buick’s gas tank detonated with a sound like a huge and distant door slamming. The truck’s body was blown apart in the middle, and a lethal hail of automobile parts was sprayed in all directions. A Caprice crankshaft was driven right through the back of the driver’s cab, right through the back of his seat, and with a terrible and decisive crunch, right through his lower back. A spare Oldsmobile hub-cap sang through the air with the alien certainty of a flying-saucer, and sliced the head from the Mexican gardener who had witnessed Sergeant Houk’s blazing ride down the hill. He stood headless with his sickle in his hand, as if, headless, he was unable to decide whether to fall over or not.
Then he dropped to the ground and began to irrigate the marigolds with a thick and glutinous stream of blood.
It was almost ten seconds before the last echoes of the explosion came back from the distant mountain, and the last fragments of shattered automobile parts came ringing down from the sky.
Otto turned away from the living-room window, and gave Helmwige a thin smile. ‘It makes me impatient, you know, to show them who will be the masters next.’
‘You should take more care,’ Helmwige replied, in a voice which was meant to show him that she was deeply unimpressed.
‘You heard what he said. Nobody knew that he was coming here, neither his superiors nor his colleagues. He came because our friend Herr Denman told him where to come. Herr Denman has an unpleasantly inquisitive turn of mind, you know, and the fact that we are keeping Celia here is obviously not enough to keep him from hounding us.’
‘So what are you going to do?’ asked Helmwige, flatly. ‘You’re not thinking of burning him, are you?’
‘Of course not. Our future lies with men like Herr Denman. Good stock! Good fathers! Heaven knows that we are going to need all that we can get. But . . . he is not behaving himself. I am going to be obliged to bring him here, and keep him out of harm’s way until der Umgestaltung, the Transformation. Then he can burn. But not before. You remember what der Führer always said to me. “Otto,” he always said to me, “the search for purity will take the lives of many martyrs. But we must seek purity first and last. Die Reinheit zuerst, die Reinheit letzt. Die Reinheit is alles.”’
Helmwige drew her silk bathrobe even more tightly around her, and stalked across to the far side of the living-room. The young naked man was still chained there, sitting cross-legged now, his face etched extremely sharp and pale against the southern California sunlight, every hard well-exercised muscle clearly defined. Helmwige stood over him for a long time, apparently admiring him, yet obviously despising him at the same time.
‘The master race,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘What a pathetic specimen.’
Otto came and stood beside her, his hands in the pockets of his shorts. ‘I suppose I have to agree. But then it was difficult for so many of those doctors to make such a leap of the mind. Mengele, what an idiot! And even the best of them, the very finest, Bloss and Hauer and von Harn, they could never understand that the master race was not just a question of genealogy, not just a question of breeding, but a question of the elements, too. The old, unquestioned power of the earth. That is what makes a master race.’
Helmwige ran her red-clawed hand through the young man’s hair. ‘Still, you know, I like him.’
‘You like him!’ Otto sneered. ‘He is nothing more than a failed experiment! A racial dead-end! My God, if der Führer hadn’t made me promise, I would have destroyed him years ago, yes, and his father before him, and his father before him.’
‘But you did promise,’ Helmwige reminded him.
Otto walked across to the curved 1930s’ cocktail cabinet, found a bottle of schnapps, and poured himself a drink. ‘Yes, I did promise,’ he agreed. ‘And look at the result. A creature with perfect physique. Perfect body, perfect eyesight, perfect hearing. Pity his IQ is slightly below room-temperature.’
Helmwige continued to stroke the young man’s blond, flat-cropped hair. He didn’t lift his eyes to her once, didn’t smile, didn’t scowl, didn’t acknowledge her at all, except when she began to run the very edges of her fingernails down the back of his neck, through those fine tiny almost-invisible hairs. Then his penis gradually swelled and uncurled, not fully erect, but visibly enlarged and thickened.
‘Helmwige,’ Otto admonished her, with a flatness in his voice which betrayed the fact that he was neither jealous nor interested. To him, the young man had less value than a laboratory chimpanzee. He was simply a nuisance, who had to be fed and exercised and accommodated. If Helmwige hadn’t adored him so much, he probably would have set him alight years ago. That big fat prick would have burned like an altar candle.
Helmwige ran her fingernails all the way down the young man’s knobbly spine. Then she traced the clearly developed lines of his deltoids, his teres minor and teres major, his latissimus dorsi. His chains clanked slightly as she stroked his shoulders, and his penis swelled even larger, until the foreskin gradually rolled back of its own accord, revealing the bare plum-like glans, with its high distinctive ridge, and its deeply cleft opening.
‘You should have given him a name,’ said Helmwige. ‘How can anybody exist without a name?’
Otto sipped a little schnapps; ran a thin tongue-tip across thinner lips. ‘He doesn’t need a name.’
‘How can he live, without a name?’ Helmwige protested. They had been through this same argument more times than Otto could count.
‘All he has to do is to live,’ he retorted. ‘A name is unnecessary. A dog may understand English, but you don’t buy books, even for the cleverest dog.’
Helmwige stroked the young man’s buttocks, and the sides of his thighs. Then she said to him, quite matter-of-factly, ‘Turn over, you can be the cleverest dog.’
With a scraping and jangling of chains, the young man turned over until he was on all fours. He remained exquisitely handsome. His back beautifully curved, his thigh muscles taut. But he remained silent, too, and willing to obey.
‘Now, look at him,’ grinned Helmwige. ‘Should I take him for a walk, on the end of a leash?’
‘He will probably kill you one day,’ Otto remarked, draining his schnapps and immediately pouring himself another.
‘Oh, he won’t kill me. He loves me. He adores me! I am the only one who treats him to what he likes!’
‘That’s what you think,’ Otto told her. ‘You humiliate him. Even a masochist has his pride, you know.’ He patted his shorts, and said, ‘Where are my cigarettes?’
‘On the table,’ Helmwige replied.
‘Those are Marlboro. You know that I smoke only Ernte 23.’
Helmwige laughed, without humour. ‘You smoke detectives, too, and all kinds of people!’
Otto snapped, ‘Leave that boy alone! Go and find my cigarettes!’
‘Oh, find your own cigarettes,’ Helmwige replied. ‘Just look at this.’
She spread apart the young man’s buttock with her long red fingernails. Then, with the kind of taunting smile in her eyes that she knew Otto would find infuriating, she licked her index finger, and plunged it without hesitation into the knotted muscular rose of the young man’s bottom. He flinched, uttered a low gasp, but accepted her sharp-nailed finger without complaint.
‘I suppose you were worse at Ohrdruf,’ Otto commented.
‘Everybody was worse at Ohrdruf. Guards, prisoners, everybody. The prisoners were as much to blame as we were. They brought it upon themselves. Have you ever experienced a race of people with such a death wish! How can a murderer be a murderer without a victim? In every murder, my dear Otto, the victim is an accomplice.’
Slowly, she withdrew her finger. Then she cupped the young man’s testicles in her hand, and squeezed them, and massaged them, over and over, until they bulged between her fingers.
Otto looked away. ‘You are appalling, my dear. You always were. I suppose your only redeeming feature is your complete disregard for human life, including your own.’
‘Turn over,’ Helmwige commanded the young man, and silently, he did so. Helmwige grasped the huge veined shaft of his penis in both hands, and rubbed it up and down, looking intently and questioningly into his eyes as she did so.
‘How does that feel, then?’ she asked him. ‘Do you like it? Do you hate it? You don’t really know, do you? What a vegetable!’
Now the head of his penis was gleaming and slick. Helmwige rubbed him harder and quicker. A faint flush of colour appeared on his perfect cheekbones; his stomach muscles tensed; and he closed his eyes. If possible, his penis appeared to grow even larger, and the opening gaped like a huge fish gasping for air.
‘Now,’ ordered Helmwige, with unexpected softness, and bent her head forward. Her mouth enclosed the head of his penis just as he shuddered, and ejaculated. She waited with her braided head bent forward in his lap for almost half a minute, and before she finally sat up, she pulled back the foreskin as far as it would go, and gave his shining skin one last definitive lick.
She stood up, and approached Otto with shining lips. The young man remained where he was, his head still bowed, his penis shrinking.
‘Don’t you know what a tribute I pay you, Otto?’ Helmwige teased him. Otto flinched and turned away, his thin fingers tightening on his schnapps glass.
‘Otto—you are always the true master. Look what I have done for you! Mengele produced his so-called master race, and I have simply swallowed it!’
Otto refused to look at her. A few moments passed, the road outside was chaotic with sirens. Helmwige said, ‘What is death, Otto? Where does it begin, where does it end? Supposing your mother had swallowed your father’s sperm, on the night when you were due to be conceived? She would have killed you! You would have died, and been digested, and floated out to the Baltic, the tiniest atom in a whole universe of atoms.’
‘Helmwige,’ said Otto at last, still averting his face. ‘If you touch that young man again, I will burn him to death in front of you. And that is my warning.’
Helmwige smiled. ‘Why should I worry, Otto? You can frighten many, many people, but you can’t frighten me. In any case, why should I care, when you plan to burn the whole world.’