The Charlie Parker Collection 2

by John Connolly

  Fear of death or injury was not the main cause of mental breakdowns in combat; in fact, it was found to be among the least important factors. Nor was exhaustion, although it could be a contributor. Rather, it was the burden of killing, and of killing up close and knowing that it was your bullet or your bayonet that had brought a life to an end. Sailors did not suffer psychiatric casualties to any similar degree. Neither did bomber pilots dropping their loads high above cities that might have been, from their distant vantage point, entirely empty of citizens. The difference was one of proximity, of, for want of a better term, intimacy. This was death heard and smelled and tasted and felt. This was to face the aggression and hostility of another directed entirely at oneself, and to be forced to acknowledge one’s own aggression and hatred in turn. It was to recognize that one had become, potentially, both victim and executioner. This was a denial of one’s own humanity, and the humanity of others.

  The boy named Louis was unusual. Here was an individual who had responded to a hostile stimulus in a forebrained way, approaching the threat as a problem to be solved. It wasn’t simply that the second, midbrain filter had been overcome; instead, Gabriel wondered if the issue had ever even reached that stage. This was a cold-blooded, premeditated killing. It indicated significant potential. The difficulty, from Gabriel’s point of view, lay in the physical distance from the killing itself that the boy had maintained. Gabriel understood the relationship between physical proximity and the trauma of killing. It was harder to kill someone up close with a knife than it was to shoot him at long range with a sniper’s rifle. Similarly, the sense of elation that frequently came with a kill was increasingly short-lived the closer the killer was to the victim, for in that situation guilt was as close as the body. Gabriel had even known soldiers to comfort the man whose life they had taken as he lay dying, whispering apologies for what had been done.

  In real terms, the apparent ease with which the boy had killed suggested a possible dissociation, a reluctance or inability to recognize the consequences of his actions; that, or an intellectual understanding that he had murdered someone combined with an emotional denial of the act, and with that any real responsibility for it. He would have to be tested further so that his true nature might be revealed. The boy did not appear to be showing signs of undue stress. He had, it seemed, handled himself calmly when faced with sometimes violent interrogation. He had not broken. He was not seeking an opportunity to confess, to expiate his sin. True, stress might reveal itself later, but for the moment he appeared relatively untroubled by what he had done.

  It was only a small percentage of men, that elusive two percent, who, under the right circumstances, could kill without remorse. Those circumstances did not necessarily involve personal risk, or even a risk to the lives of others. It was, at one level, a matter of conditioning and situation. At some point, the boy would have to be placed in the right envir onment in order to see how he might respond. If he did not react correctly, that would be the end of the matter. It might also, Gabriel knew, mean the boy’s death.

  There was also the matter of how he would respond to authority. It was one thing to kill for oneself, and quite another to kill because someone told you to do so. Soldiers were more likely to fire their weapons when their leaders were present, and were more effective when they were bound to that leader by their respect for him. Gabriel was in a different position: his charges had to be willing to do what he told them even while he himself was far away. He was like a general, but without subordinates in the field who could ensure that his orders were carried out to the letter. In turn, leaders in combat had a degree of legitimacy that came from their status in the hierarchy of their nations, but Gabriel’s position was far more ambiguous.

  For all of these reasons, Gabriel picked those whom he used with great care. True sociopaths were of no use to him, because they did not respect authority. The younger his charges were, the better, for the young were more open to manipulation. He tried to look for weaknesses to exploit, ways to fill the gaps in their lives. The boy Louis lacked a father figure, but he had not been so desperate to find one that he was prepared to acquiesce to Deber’s authority, or to flee from him in order to seek another when it became apparent that Deber considered him a threat. Gabriel would have to tread lightly. Louis’s trust would be hard-earned.

  But from what Gabriel had learned, Louis was also a natural loner. He had no close friends, and he lived as the only male in a household of women. He was not the kind who would form relationships within larger groups, which meant that, if his natural instincts were channeled, he would not seek absolution for his actions from others. Absolution was one thing Gabriel could not offer, and that, in turn, was why he preferred those who were not unduly troubled by guilt. Neither did he want those who might identify excessively with their victims. To do what he required of them necessitated emotional distance, and on occasion Gabriel was prepared to alter his approach in order to exploit social, moral or cultural differences between his Reapers and their victims. Nevertheless, he did not seek to eradicate empathy entirely, for the absence of empathy was another indicator of sociopathy. Some empathy was a necessary restraint upon hostile or sadistic behavior. A delicate balance had to be maintained. It was the difference between being prepared to hurt someone when required, and hurting someone when one desired.

  According to what Gabriel had learned before his arrival at the little police department, the boy was a fighter, one who would stand his ground when provoked. That was good. It indicated an important predisposition to aggression, even a longing for an opportunity to display it. Louis’s experiences with Deber had been the trigger for what followed but, to complete the analogy, the weapon had already been loaded long before then. There were also rumors that the boy was a homosexual; if not a practicing one, for he was still very young, then he had at least exhibited sufficient tendencies to allow rumors about his sexuality to circulate locally. Gabriel, as in so many other areas, was enlightened about matters of individual sexuality. He distinguished between those aspects that were aberrant – a predilection toward violence, for example, or the impulse to abuse children – and those that were not. Aberrant sexual behavior indicated a degree of unreliability that tended to exhibit itself in other areas as well, and rendered its practitioners unsuitable for Gabriel’s purposes. Gabriel was not a homosexual, but he understood the nature of sexual desire, just as he understood the nature of aggression and hostility, for the two were not as distant as some liked to believe. While there were some aspects of human behavior that could be controlled and altered, there were some that could not, and one’s sexual orientation was among them. Louis’s sexuality interested Gabriel only in the sense that it might make him vulnerable or conflicted. Such weakness could be exploited.

  And so Gabriel watched Louis through the glass, and the boy stared back. Five minutes passed in this way, and at the end Gabriel nodded once to himself in apparent satisfaction, then stood and left the room to face the fifteen-year-old killer.

  Like any good leader, Gabriel loved his people, in his fashion, even though he was prepared, at all times, to sacrifice them if the need arose. Over the years that followed, Louis fulfilled, and even exceeded, Gabriel’s expectations, except in one regard: he refused to kill women on Gabriel’s orders. It was, Gabriel supposed, a legacy of his upbringing, and Gabriel made allowances for it, for he did indeed love Louis. He became like a son to him and Gabriel, in turn, became the father of the man.

  Gabriel stepped into the interrogation room and took a seat across the table from Louis. The room smelled of perspir ation and other less pleasant things, but Gabriel did not give any indication that he noticed. The boy’s face was shiny with sweat.

  Gabriel unplugged the tape recorder from the wall, then sat across from Louis and placed his hands upon the table. ‘My name is Gabriel,’ he said. ‘And you, I believe, are Louis.’

  The boy did not answer, but simply regarded the older man silently, waiting to see what might
be revealed.

  ‘You’re free to go, by the way,’ said Gabriel. ‘You will not be charged with the commission of any crime.’

  This time, the boy reacted. His mouth opened slightly, and his eyebrows lifted an inch. He looked at the door.

  ‘Yes, you can walk out of here right now, if you choose,’ Gabriel continued. ‘Nobody will try to stop you. Your grandmother is waiting outside for you. She will take you back to your little cabin. You can sleep in your own bed, be among familiar things. All will be as it once was.’

  He smiled. The boy had not moved.

  ‘Or don’t you believe that?’

  ‘What do you want?’ said Louis.

  ‘Want? I want to help you. I think you are a very unusual young man. I might even go so far as to say that you’re gifted, although your gift is one that might not be appreciated in circles such as these.’

  He waved his right hand gently, taking in the interrogation room, the station house, Wooster, the law . . .

  ‘I can help you to find your place in the world. In return, your skills can be put to better use than they would be here. You see, if you stay in this town you’ll overstep the mark. You’ll be challenged, threatened. That threat may come from the police, or from others. You’ll respond to it, but you’re known now. You won’t get away a second time with what you did, and you’ll die for it.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  Gabriel wagged a finger, but it was not a disapproving gesture.

  ‘Very good, very good,’ he said. He chuckled, then allowed sound to drift into silence before he spoke again.

  ‘Let me tell you what will happen next. Deber had friends, or perhaps “acquaintances” would be a better word for them. They are men like him, and worse. They cannot allow his death to go unremarked. It would damage their own reputations, and suggest a degree of weakness that might leave them open to attack by others. Already, they will know that you have been questioned about what happened to him, and they will not be as skeptical as the state police. If you return to your home, they will find you and they will kill you. Perhaps, along the way, they will hurt the women who share that home with you. Even if you run, they will come after you.’

  ‘Why should you care?’

  ‘Care? I don’t care. I can walk away from here, and leave you and your family to your fate, and it will cause me not a moment’s regret. Or you can hear my offer, and perhaps something mutually beneficial may result. Your problem is that you do not know me, and therefore cannot trust me. I fully understand your predicament. I realize that you will need time to consider what I am suggesting –’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re suggesting,’ said Louis. ‘You haven’t said.’

  He is almost droll, thought Gabriel. He is old beyond his years.

  ‘I offer discipline, training. I offer a way for you to channel your anger, to use your talents.’

  ‘Protection?’

  ‘I can help you to protect yourself.’

  ‘And my family?’

  ‘They’re at risk only as long as you remain here, and only if they know where you are.’

  ‘So I can go with you, or I can walk out of here?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  Louis pursed his lips in thought.

  ‘Thank you for your time, sir,’ he said, after some moments had passed. ‘I’m going to leave now.’

  Gabriel nodded. He reached into his jacket pocket and produced an envelope. He handed it to the boy. After a moment’s hesitation, Louis took it and opened it. He tried to hide his reaction to what was inside, but the widening of his eyes betrayed him.

  ‘There’s a thousand dollars in that envelope,’ said Gabriel. ‘There’s also a card with a telephone number on it. Through that number I can be reached at any time, day or night. You think about my offer, but remember what I said: you can’t go home again. You need to get far away from here – far, far away – and then you need to figure out what you’re going to do when those men come calling on you. Because they will.’

  Louis closed the envelope and left the room. Gabriel did not follow him. He did not have to. He knew the boy would leave this town. If he did not, then Gabriel had misjudged him and he was of no use to him anyway. The money did not matter. Gabriel had faith in his own judgment. The money would come back to him many times over.

  After he was released, Louis walked back with his grandmother to the cabin in the woods. They did not speak, even though it was a two-mile walk. When they reached home, Louis packed a bag with his clothes and some mementoes of his mother – photos, one or two items of jewelry that had been passed on to him – then took two hundred dollars from the envelope and secreted the cash in various pockets, in a slash in the waistband of his trousers, and in one of his shoes. The remainder he divided into two piles, slipping the smaller into the right front pocket of his jeans and the rest back into the envelope. Then he kissed good-bye to the women who had raised him, handed the envelope and the five hundred dollars it contained to his grandmother, and got a ride on Mr Otis’s truck to the bus station. He asked to make only one stop along the way. Mr Otis was reluctant to oblige him, but he saw what Wooster had seen in the boy, and what Gabriel had seen too, and he understood that he was not to be crossed, not in this thing or in any other. So Mr Otis pulled up just past Little Tom’s bar, his truck hidden by the bushes that lined the road, and watched the boy walk into the dirt lot, then disappear from view.

  Mr Otis began to sweat.

  Little Tom looked up from the newspaper that lay open on the bar. There were no customers to distract him, not yet, and the radio was tuned to a football game. He liked these quiet moments. For the rest of the night he would serve drinks and make small talk with his customers. He would discuss sports, the weather, men’s relationships with their womenfolk (for women did not trouble Little Tom’s bar, any more than the coloreds did, and thus the bar was a refuge for a certain type of man). Little Tom understood the role his bar performed: no decisions of great import were made here, and no conversations of any consequence took place. There was no trouble, for Little Tom would not tolerate it, and no drunkenness, for Little Tom did not approve of that either. When a man had consumed what Little Tom adjudged to be ‘enough,’ he would be sent on his way with some words of advice about driving carefully and not getting into any arguments once he was home. The police were rarely called to Little Tom’s premises. He was in good standing with the town fathers.

  None of this distracted from the fact that, like many men who practiced a public and superficial version of what they considered to be a reasonable way of life, Little Tom was an animal, a creature of violent and abusive appetites, sexually incontinent and filled with loathing for all those who were different from himself: women, especially those who would not touch him unless money was involved; Jews, although he did not know any; churchgoers of any liberal stripe or persuasion; Polish, Irish, Germans, and any others who spoke American with an accent or who had names that Little Tom could not pronounce with ease; and all coloreds, without exception.

  Now, a young black man was standing on the threshold of Little Tom’s bar, watching him as he read his newspaper. Little Tom didn’t know how long the colored had been standing there, but however long it had been, it was too long.

  ‘Be on your way, boy,’ said Little Tom. ‘This ain’t a place for you.’

  The boy did not move. Little Tom shifted position and began to walk toward the raised hatch in the bar. Along the way, he picked up the bat that lay beneath the bar. There was a shotgun there too, but Little Tom figured that the sight of the bat would be enough.

  ‘You hear what I said? Be about your business.’

  The boy spoke. ‘I know what you did,’ he said.

  Little Tom stopped. The boy’s composure unnerved him. His tone was even, and he had not blinked since Little Tom had first noticed him, not once. His gaze seemed to penetrate Little Tom’s skull and crawl like a spider over the surface of his brai
n.

  ‘The hell are you talking about?’

  ‘I know what you did to Errol Rich.’

  Little Tom grinned. The grin grew slowly, spreading like oil. So that was what this was about: a colored, a nigger, letting his anger get the better of his senses. Well, Little Tom knew all about dealing with coloreds who couldn’t keep a civil tongue in their mouths in front of a white man.

  ‘He got what was coming to him,’ said Little Tom. ‘You’re about to get what’s coming to you too.’

  He moved swiftly, swinging the bat as he came, striking up instead of down, aiming for the boy’s ribs, but the boy stepped nimbly forward, into the stroke instead of away from it, so that the bat struck the wood of the door frame at the same time as fingers gripped Little Tom’s throat and spun him against the wall. The impact of the bat on the wood sent a painful vibration up Little Tom’s arm, so that it was still weak when the edge of the boy’s left hand hit it, causing the bat to fall to the floor.

  Little Tom was too surprised to react. No colored had ever touched him before, not even a black woman, for Little Tom did not consort with other races, either forcibly or with their consent. He smelled the boy’s breath as he leaned closer. The fingers tightened on his throat, and then he heard the back door of the bar open and a man shouted something. The grip upon him eased a little, and then he was flung to one side, tripping over a stool and landing heavily.