The Traveler

by John Katzenbach

  “I mean,” she continued, “you talk about these pictures with such respect. Both the ones you took and the ones you’ve seen.”

  “I’ve taken a lot of pictures. A lot of different things.”

  She nodded and they sped on in silence.

  Douglas Jeffers thought of his pictures.

  “Always death,” he said. “Well, not always. But lately more and more. I shoot death. I did a series, an essay for Life, not too long ago. On a twenty-four-hour shift in a big-city emergency room . . .”

  “Oh,” Anne Hampton interrupted, “I saw those. They were good.”

  “They were about death. Even the shots of the doctors and nurses and ambulance drivers—the task, you see, was to capture how all that violence and smashed and torn bodies diminished them. Day after day. Night after night. You see, you rub up against something awful for too long and it becomes a part of you. Sticks to your skin.”

  He paused before saying, “That’s what’s happened to me.”

  She nodded, and for a moment felt an awkward sympathy.

  Then she remembered the rain and wind, the wrong road and the Gulf waters, and she had a sudden horrible vision of what it would be like, lying beneath the earth. She felt instantly suffocated and gulped her next breath of air.

  “I’ve lost track,” said Jeffers matter-of-factly.

  She felt her chest contract and air wheezed in and out. She felt asthmatic, feeble.

  “Of what?” she moaned her question.

  “Of how many deaths I’ve seen. I used to know, you know. I could count them. But not any longer. They all blend together. When I was in that emergency room, they brought a kid in, a teenager, just a couple of years younger than you. He’d been the passenger in a car driven by a drunk. The other kid, the driver, wouldn’t you know it, had a couple of bruises and a fractured forearm. But this kid was going to buy it and the terrible thing was, he wasn’t unconscious. He knew it. He knew all the people around him and all the devices and the needles and the machines were all going to be useless. I got a shot of his eyes, right before he went. They didn’t use it, though. Not enough clarity in the shot, some sonuvabitch shoved me right as I tripped the shutter . . .”

  He shrugged.

  “It happens. It’s part of the business.”

  He paused, then continued.

  “I went home that night and wondered just what number that kid was. Was he the thousandth? Or the ten thousandth? I once knew a police reporter who kept a running count, and so I did, too. But the number got out of hand. In Vietnam? Beirut? I was there a couple of times. Talk about cheap life. . . When that charter flight went down outside of New Orleans, it split apart and people were scattered everywhere. The rescue squads were plucking parts of bodies from the trees, just like culling so much rotten fruit . . .”

  “It just happened,” Anne Hampton said. “Things just happen.”

  “No, they don’t,” Jeffers replied angrily. “The kid dies because his buddy drinks too much. The flight crashes because the pilot decides to let the copilot try a takeoff and ignores the tower’s warning about wind shear. The little kids in Beirut die because they play outside and rocket grenades launched at random have this uncanny way of finding kids in a street . . .

  “There are actions and reactions. Death is just the most common.”

  He looked at her.

  “You see, when I kill someone it’s because I want to. It’s the only way I have of reminding myself that I’m still alive.”

  Her hand shook as she took down his words.

  He waited.

  Silence surrounded them. She knew, though, that he would fill it.

  “More than . . .” But he stopped before adding a number.

  She closed her eyes and tried to breathe slowly. When she opened them, she saw he was grinning.

  She did not ask him for specificity.

  He drove steadily, wordlessly, for two hours. When they needed gasoline he pulled into a station along the interstate, telling the attendant sullenly to fill the tank, paying cash, and accelerating out of the station quickly but nonchalantly, giving to all the world the appearance of a normal couple, not pressed by time, but pushing with routine dispatch toward a known destination and some distinct result.

  Finally he spoke:

  “Boswell, aren’t you filled with wonder? Don’t you have hundreds of questions?”

  Anne Hampton thought that she was filled with nothing save fear.

  “I didn’t think I should ask,” she said. “I figured you’d tell me what you wanted.”

  He nodded. “That seems sensible.”

  After a moment he continued.

  “Boswell, don’t you wonder why we’re doing this?”

  She nodded.

  “I know you’ve got some plan . . .”

  “Yes,” he said. “Quite a specific one at that.”

  He did not volunteer information. Instead he said:

  “Do I look old, Boswell? Can you see lines in my face? Do I look tired and frustrated and bilious and cantankerous with age? I feel very old, Boswell. Ancient.”

  His voice changed suddenly and he demanded harshly:

  “What day did we first meet?”

  Her throat closed and she choked.

  She could not remember. A part of her wanted to say that she’d been in the car forever, that she’d always been with him. Another part, deeper, as if being awakened from sleep, forced itself into her consciousness, with pictures of her apartment, dried flowers in a vase on the windowsill, bookcases, desk, small bed and table. There were some pictures of her parents and a watercolor on the wall of boats in a harbor that she’d seen on a trip east a few years back. It had been too expensive, but there was something in the picture that captured her, perhaps the peace, the order, the calm of boats at mooring in the late day’s sunshine. She remembered her classes, the way the summer heat would wake her in the morning, the sticky sensation of sweat as she walked across the campus. Then, just as swiftly, she saw her parents back home in Colorado, sitting about the house, quietly proceeding with their lives. If they knew, she thought, they would be panicked, crying. In agony. She wondered then whether they were people in a dream.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “You understand, no one knows.”

  She nodded.

  “No one is looking for you.”

  She nodded again.

  “Even if someone were curious, they wouldn’t know where to look. They wouldn’t know what direction to start searching. Do you understand? You’ve left no trail.”

  She nodded a third time.

  “People walk away from life all the time. Poof! They vanish. Disappear. One minute they’re there, the next, well, gone.”

  She dipped her head in acquiescent sorrow.

  “That’s what has happened to you.”

  He looked at her harshly.

  “I am your past now. I am your future.”

  She wanted to cry but dared not. She thought of those funeral voices: Be brave. The memory made her angry.

  Jeffers continued.

  “It’s like those damn milk cartons with the pictures and identifying data of lost children on their sides. Depressing. The children are gone. Stolen away forever. We are a nation of Pied Pipers, you see. Constantly playing a tune to lead others astray. That’s what happened to you. Swallowed up.”

  He paused.

  “That’s what happened to all of them.”

  How many more? she suddenly wondered.

  Oh, God, she said to herself. I’m next. I’m still next. I’ve always been next. But she didn’t have time to let this fear formulate into some panic-stricken scream. And, after a moment she realized that it was the same fear that had dogged her from the start, and wh
en she assigned this degree of familiarity to it, it suddenly seemed less terrifying. She wondered for an instant whether this was some sort of death recognition, whether she was like the people on an airplane that starts to fall precipitously from the sky. She had read of the momentary screams fading into a calmed acceptance, a peaceful, prayerful time. Like the instants before the firing squad. Do you want a cigarette? A blindfold? asks the captain. No, just a momentary look out at the morning.

  She stared out the window, shading her eyes from the brightness of the summer sun. She did not know why, but she felt an odd, unfamiliar ease.

  Jeffers hummed a tune. “I wonder what piece the Pied Piper played on his flute. Was it the same for the rats as it was for the children?”

  He seemed to consider things briefly.

  “I always wondered, even when I was a child, why the parents of Hamelin didn’t do anything. You know, they just stood there like a bunch of idiots. I would have . . .”

  His voice trailed off for an instant.

  “Look,” Jeffers asked. “What do you know about murder?”

  She thought of the derelict and replied, “Just what I learned the other night.”

  Jeffers smiled.

  “Good answer,” he said. “That shows some moxie, huh? Boswell isn’t quite as timid as she acts sometimes.”

  He punched the accelerator and the car jumped forward. Then, just as swiftly, he eased off and they returned to the same droning modest speed.

  “Murder is, as you saw, blissfully easy. It’s only in Hollywood that people stare down the barrel of a gun, hesitating, filled with moral conflict and guilt. In reality it happens simply and quickly. An argument and bang! Not that much difference, really, between your standard night-the-welfare-checks-come-out argument in the ghetto and some military operation that requires weeks or months of planning. There’s always some fundamentally stupid dispute at the bottom. Even in my case, you know, if I was truly introspective, I could probably find the base, shall I say cause, for what I do. Some unresolved anger. Some out-of-control hatred. That’s the kind of phrase my brother would use. But what is an unresolved anger? Just an argument between all the different parts of yourself. Life is always a debate between your good side and your bad side, anyway. The bad side wants you to take that extra dessert, right? Just like those Saturday-morning cartoons they show for kids, where a little devil pops up urging Foghorn Leghorn or Donald Duck or Goofy or whatever cute and furry little animal they use nowadays to do something wrong and then a little angel pops up, insisting they take the true and proper path . . .”

  Jeffers laughed shortly, sharply, before going on.

  “Anyway, do you know why we committed that crime with impunity? Because it was committed at random. Look at us. Are we the type of people who appear like they would go around blowing out the brains of drunken derelicts? Thrill-seekers? Leopold and Loeb? What? Not a professional photographer. Award-winning, no less. Not an honors college student. You see, we had no connection with that event at all. No one saw us. No one suspects us. It was just a simple, single, random happening, or at least that’s what the authorities will think.

  “In fact it barely happened at all. Just how much time do you think some overworked and underpaid homicide detective is going to want to spend on a dead derelict who probably has no identification anyway? Ten minutes? An hour? A day? No more. Enough time so that he can fill out some form and file it with his superior and move on to the next case. Something a bit sexier maybe. Something with headlines. Something that our society places some value on. A society killing or a love-triangle murder. And who can blame him? You see, it was really so inconsequential. Unknown drifter dies mysteriously. Put out a memo. Check to see if they have any other unsolved derelict-murder cases that seem similar. End of story. At least that’s what the official version will be. The political version . . .

  “But of course we know differently, don’t we? Too bad, in a way, isn’t it? Some poor cop could make his career if only he knew, had some inkling what had really happened. Because it wasn’t unimportant, was it? Not to us.”

  After a moment she managed a reply.

  “But it can’t always be so, I don’t know, easy . . .”

  She hated that word. For him, she realized, it was an absolute truth. For her, she thought, a total lie. I won’t, she said suddenly to herself. I won’t be him.

  She surprised herself with her determination.

  “Of course not. Otherwise there would be no challenge. No adventure. Did you ever read The Most Dangerous Game?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  He snorted. “Come on, Boswell, where’s your education?”

  “I’ve read a lot,” she replied defensively. “I’ve read books you probably don’t know about! What do you know about Middlemarch?” She heard her own voice speaking and she wanted to clap a hand over her mouth. She shut her eyes, expecting a blow.

  Instead he laughed.

  “Touché,” he said. “But on to my question: What is the most dangerous game?”

  “Murder isn’t a game.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  They were silent.

  “All right,” he said after a second had passed, “I’ll be less frivolous. Of course murder isn’t a game. But it’s not a hobby either. It’s a mode of life. My mode of life.”

  “I just don’t understand how . . .” she started, but he interrupted her.

  He was laughing.

  “Well, finally. She asks why! She asks how! It’s about time.”

  His voice darkened.

  “And now I’ll tell you.”

  She felt then as if she had stumbled foolishly into something she was forbidden to see. She remembered once peering through the crack in her parents’ bedroom door one restless night and seeing them wrapped together in subdued but noisy love. Her face flushed with the same mixture of fear and embarrassment. She dropped her pencil and had to lean down to pick it up. She was struck with the realization that knowledge was dangerous, that the more she knew the more entwined she was and the more she could never escape. Her mind filled with black sorrow and she wanted to cry like a child, alone, just as she had after that dark and primal vision, some innocence forever abandoned, smothering her tears into her pillow, cut off from any world save that defined by her own personal and exclusive agony.

  He waited, filled with confidence and a kind of runaway excitement, until he knew she was riven with the foreboding that the questions were bound to create. He thought: Finally. His words exploded from him in a torrent of enthusiasm.

  “I realized after the first that I’d been incredibly lucky. Picking up a prostitute on the street in a rental car easily traceable to me. Striking her in the car, so that there was her blood type staining the upholstery. Abandoning her in an area that I was unfamiliar with. Why, at any point someone could have seen me. Someone could have latched on to the situation. A passerby. Her pimp. A trucker peering down from twelve feet up in his cab. I left footprints and fingerprints and God knows what else that some forensics lab could trace back to me. Fiber samples, dirt samples, hair samples. Hell, I even used a credit card to buy the shovel I used to bury her. I did everything wrong. Awfully goddamn stupid, you know . . .”

  He looked at her briefly but didn’t expect her to answer.

  “Do you know what I experienced afterwards? The most seductive fear. The sensation that you get when you realize after the fact that you’ve been in great jeopardy. The kind of fear that takes shape and re-forms in nightmares. I walked around in a kind of twilight, thinking I was becoming paranoid, imagining every minute that any one of these schoolboy errors was going to manifest itself in a detective carrying an arrest warrant. It never happened, of course, but the feeling was like being electrified, constantly.

  “My pictures, too. Sharper. Better. Filled with passion. Odd
, huh? From fear came art. I was driven to succeed. I remember being unable to sleep one night a couple of days afterwards. I was so filled with excitement. It had just taken me over, you see. I decided I would drive about, just watching the nighttime city glow. Maybe that could help me contain my feelings. I was listening to the police scanner. All photographers keep lots of radios about, this wasn’t unusual. You always listen, because you never know. And this was one of those nights.

  “I heard this voice come on, a clear channel, excited, near panic: Help, help, officer down, officer down . . . and then they gave the address. It was only a couple of blocks away. A state trooper, you see, made a routine traffic stop on a car driving with a taillight out. And for his trouble he’d taken a thirty-eight round in the chest. It had been four guys who’d just done a liquor store. And I got there before anyone. Before any other cops, before rescue. Just me, my camera, and the kid who’d witnessed the shooting from across the highway where he’d been changing a flat and had called in for help. He had the trooper’s head in his lap. Click! Click! Help me, the kid said. Click! Help us! he said. What are you doing? Click! Please . . . Click! Thirty seconds, maybe. Then I helped him. I took the trooper’s hand and felt for a pulse. At first it was there, but then, just like dusk, it faded and disappeared. And then everywhere, lights and sirens. God! Those were fantastic pictures!”

  Jeffers paused. His voice became slower, more cautious.

  “So I became a student of murder.”

  Silence.

  “I had to.”

  She poised her pencil above the notebook, trying to shed anxiety from her mind and simply concentrate on what he was saying. She told herself to think like she was back in a classroom and that this was just another lecture. She realized that was foolish.

  Douglas Jeffers’ head filled with images and he wondered idly whether he should start anecdotally. He stole a look at Anne Hampton and saw that she was waiting, pale, shaken, on some rim of terror, but waiting nonetheless. He felt a momentary gratification, thinking: She’s mine now.

  Then he launched ahead.

  “I had been terribly lucky, and I’m not fond of relying on luck. I started spending my spare time in libraries, reading. I read works of literature and works of science. I read legal case histories and medical tracts. I read murderers’ confessions and prison reports. I read the memoirs of detectives, pathologists, criminal-defense attorneys, prosecutors, and professional hit men. I purchased books on weaponry. I studied physiology. I put on a white lab coat and went to anatomy lectures at Columbia Medical School. I needed to know, you see, how exactly, precisely, people died.