The Blameless Dead

by Gary Haynes

  They’ve done their duty, he thought. But he felt responsible for their deaths. He mourned them in silence, although he was on the verge of weeping.

  Squinting, he spat a little onto his curled fingers, did his best to rub the dust from his lashes and the corners of his eyes. Through his still blurred vision, he could just about make out that others had survived the collapse. The Kid and Doc were among them. But Doc was writhing on the decimated floor, blood leaching from a gaping wound to the side of his head.

  Pavel felt his eyelids closing. The Kid scrambled over to him and he sensed him cradling his head. He fought the dark with what strength he had left.

  Vaguely, he heard the Kid speaking. ‘Don’t die. Not after all we’ve been through. Not now, at the end. Don’t die, sergeant.’

  The smell came to him once more. Fragrant and smoky.

  Incense.

  He saw himself watching the bearded priest as he was escorted to an NKVD wagon. He was going to the Gulag, his mother said. He heard himself asking what that was. He watched his mother’s tears in reply. The church was razed to the ground soon afterwards. Five massive explosions that made him jolt even now. The precious, centuries-old folk-art icons were thrown onto the resultant fires as if they were mere wooden trinkets.

  The world was mad then too, he thought.

  I must live.

  Shuddering, he focused on vivid images of his village, fifty miles north of Rostov-on-Don. It was still standing. Still populated. Animals rummaged around for scraps of food in their primitive pens. Pigs, sheep and chickens. His wife and children were standing outside the little whitewashed, thatched house. They were waving to him. His blonde daughter and his curly-haired son. They were calling out.

  Papa. Papa. Papa.

  5

  Manhattan, September 2015.

  Jed Watson had a rare addiction. It wasn’t something he talked about, not even in vague terms after a few drinks. He doubted anyone he considered a friend had the imagination to understand his need. In truth, he knew they’d never forgive him for it.

  He arrived home from the office early, as he always did on a Tuesday, calling out to check he was alone. His wife played bridge at a weekly card club in the neighbourhood, and their housekeeper left before 6.30 pm on alternate days. Satisfied, he dropped his briefcase inside the teak double doors and walked past the elaborate granddaughter clock in the entrance hall, his hands trembling.

  The spacious apartment was made from Indiana sandstone, with high ceilings and wide cornices, a Spanish-style terrace. It was part of a secure complex, the driveway gates electronic, the lift activated by a palm print in the underground parking lot. He felt safe here.

  He loosened his silk tie and flipped down the wall switch in the living room. Moving to the windows, he closed the brocade curtains, even though it was still light outside. There were other times when he could satisfy his craving, opportunities he welcomed, but he relied upon Tuesday evenings.

  He fixed himself three fingers of neat vodka and gulped half of it down, flinging his head back. The alcohol caressed his throat and steadied him. Sinking down into the nearest couch, its gold tassels rippling like bar chimes, he picked up a remote off the walnut coffee table and turned on the surround sound system. He had three hours.

  He’d loved Dvořák’s Requiem since childhood, the voices of the massed choir still haunting to him. His father had been a Baptist minister, his mother a conceited adulteress. He guessed his father had listened to it to mourn the passing of their marriage, to wallow in his misfortune.

  The requiem rose to the first crescendo and Watson’s own mind was deluged with images. Lurid and fragmentary. The slender arm. The curvature of the instep. The now florid cheek. The same images every time.

  He drained the vodka and strolled to the kitchen, with its herringbone tiles. He washed the heavy crystal and left it on the polished granite island. He appeared to drift through a dark corridor to his study. The sensor-activated lighting came on and he shut the blinds. Three of the walls were decorated with his collection of wooden African face masks. On the fourth was a portrait in pale watercolours, an aged samurai lady from the Meiji Period, ethereal in its simplicity. He took off his tailored suit jacket and hung it on a coat hook. Slapping his middle-aged paunch, he walked over to his desk, inlaid with bottle-green leather. Bending over, he powered up his laptop, feeling lightheaded, as if he’d just inhaled his first cigarette.

  He kept his DVD in a titanium wall safe, secured via free-speech recognition technology. Speech was impossible to replicate, he knew, even for twins, due to the uniqueness of both the voice tract and accent. He couldn’t risk anyone watching it. He knew it was a reckless habit. But he deserved to partake of it at least once a week, he believed. He’d made so many sacrifices. Hadn’t he? He’d put a heap of money into other people’s pockets, for sure. Besides, he wasn’t hurting anyone. That had been done already. He just watched.

  He lifted the watercolour off the wall, his hands clammy now. He rested it against one of the desk’s trumpet-turned legs.

  Facing the safe’s microphone, he said, ‘My special moments.’

  The safe door opened silently, magically, as if it was an occult portal, and Watson began humming along to the muted strains of the requiem, a mass for the dead.

  He placed the DVD into the drive, the contents so extreme that he’d convinced himself he’d seen it vibrate on occasion. But his wife never came into his study. The housekeeper didn’t clean in here either. He cleaned it himself. No one came in here. He was superstitious that way. He’d said he didn’t want anyone touching his work papers.

  He spun around, thinking he’d heard something above the music. A distant cabinet dragged along? A wardrobe door slammed somewhere? He couldn’t be sure. The apartment was susceptible to the odd vibration and unobtrusive noise from time to time. It was inevitable, he supposed, given the number of occupants who lived in the block. But couples had rows they’d never heard, his wife had said. Screaming matches even. He decided to put the DVD back into the safe and investigate. Best to be cautious.

  The door burst open with such force that the brass handle rebounded off the wall, dislodging a piece of plaster the size of a child’s fist. Watson gasped, his body shaking. He’d registered the two white hazmat suits, the red motorcycle helmets. The noose dangling from one hand, a coarse sack from another.

  He began to say something, but it sounded like gibberish. Vomit rose in his throat and beads of sweat sprouted at his temples. A searing pain had erupted in his chest and had streaked over his shoulders to his biceps. He panted and wheezed, his stomach tightening.

  He was dragged to his knees, his limp arms yanked behind him. The last thing he saw was one of the African masks, the hollow eyes, the downturned mouth, as the sack was thrust over his head. The darkness swamped him, and his eyelids blinked frantically like the wings of a trapped bird. When the noose tore into his neck, his rational mind degenerated into a kind of madness, and he made a faint yelping sound.

  He died less than a minute later, his mouth agape in a silent scream.

  *

  Doug, the red-faced concierge, his young body swollen by an almost constant diet of pizza, became curious, nothing more, when Mr Watson hadn’t left the building before 7:30 am as he always did on a weekday. He became a little concerned when Mrs Watson didn’t leave for her daily gym class at around 10 am. He’d seen her return early yesterday evening, her face pale, her manner flustered. He’d smelled a hint of vomit.

  They didn’t answer their internal landline, so he followed standard procedure and called the nightshift guy, who, after bitching about being woken up, said they hadn’t left. He called the duty manager then, who told him they hadn’t said they’d be leaving the apartment, although the housekeeper had called in this morning and had said she was too ill to come into work at noon. The manager advised Doug to use his master key to open their front door without entering and enquire if they needed assistance. He did so. Again, th
ere was no reply.

  He knew they couldn’t get out of the building without stopping first at ground level. The lift doors opened so he could check who was leaving and, more importantly, who was arriving from the secure parking lot. There was a sturdy fire escape at the rear, but he struggled to think of a single reason why they’d use it. Concluding that something had to be wrong, he got the OK to ring 911. But the duty manager had reminded him that their employer would face a hike in its insurance premium if he so much as stuck his big head over the threshold before the police arrived.

  *

  NYPD Sergeant Cliff Erickson, a leathery-skinned veteran, put on a pair of blue latex gloves, deciding he didn’t need to draw his Smith & Wesson 5946 sidearm, his weapon of choice. He thought the assignment as inappropriate as asking him to search a storm drain for a dropped smartphone, but he was a month off retirement, so he guessed everyone was just trying to keep him safe until then.

  The apartment’s entrance hall was unlit, the immediate room dark. He unhooked a torch from his leather belt, the beam flooding a gilded mirror, the biggest he’d seen. He located the light switch within seconds.

  He found Mrs Watson fully clothed on a king-sized bed in the master bedroom, with her throat slit. A vicious gash that resembled an exposed gill. The congealed blood was like a macabre halo encircling her head, the peach-coloured chiffon blouse streaked with it. Her skin was in the last stages of the post-mortem stain, the purple-red discolouration brought about by the blood draining back into the dependant parts of the body. Rigor mortis had set in, the tightening of the muscles, strangely accentuating her elegant features. Her stiff arm was doglegged on the silver inlay bedside table, and lumps of crispy vomit dotted her black shoulder-length hair and the lavender-coloured duvet.

  The corpse of Mr Watson was in the study, or at least that’s where the body had been dumped, Erickson thought. The flabby neck had a uniform band around it, the colour of unwashed blueberries, the whites of his dark eyes translucent, like those of a stranded catfish. It was obvious the man had asphyxiated through strangulation. Bloating hadn’t set in yet, neither had the rotting of flesh, which meant that both victims had died within the last twenty-four hours. It fitted with what he already knew, but the stench of the soiled, unyielding body on the floor made him wince.

  He felt the urge to smoke. He lifted his peaked cap off his slick forehead, took out a stick of gum from his navy-blue trousers, peeled off the foil wrapper, and tossed the gum into his mouth. He noticed that the empty tray of a DVD player had been left protruding from the side of a laptop, a disc recently ejected. He clutched his radio, about to report the murders, and began retracing his steps, happy to leave the dirty work to the crime scene unit, although he wondered if the empty tray was significant.

  6

  Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, five days later.

  It was the beginning of the autumn term and Gabriel Hall was standing in front of a pine lectern that had blackened with age at the base. He wore squid-ink jeans and a matching polo shirt. The windowless room was part of an unattractive box-like structure, a modern building by Yale’s standards, housing a registrar’s office and two floors of classrooms. Several of the law school’s classrooms in the Sterling Law Building were undergoing redecoration, and he’d taken what had been offered. A semi-circle of banked half-desks was illuminated by energy-saving strips that gave off insipid yellow glows, the air was stale, due to the room’s previous lack of use, and dust motes hung there. About twenty young people were sitting on small, padded seats, with a smattering of foreign and mature students.

  Gabriel had all but finished his lecture when he saw a female student, head down, skimming through what he was sure were social media posts on her smartphone, like a bank clerk counting notes. He knew that keeping the attention of all of them for the duration of his lecture was a high bar, but it disappointed him. He was forty years old, his hair a rich chestnut colour, his ash-grey eyes flecked with mauve. He’d taught criminal justice at the university on a part-time basis for the past three years, and was still in private practice, specializing in white-collar crime in New York City. The teaching didn’t pay well, but the prestige it generated was good for business, despite the recent controversy over some of the students’ denunciations of resident professors.

  He decided to change tack. ‘Franz Kafka’s novel, The Trial, is about an accused man who is never told what his crime is. Neither is the reader.’ He grinned and saw a few of the students grinning back at him. ‘Why? Because the novel’s theme is powerlessness. The powerlessness that people feel when they’re faced with a remote and tickbox bureaucracy. That’s not unlike how some of your clients will feel one day. What they are looking for is not sympathy, but something akin to empathy.’

  He saw that the student, Summer Cox, the gifted but haughty daughter of a well-connected Philadelphia senator, was still flicking through her smartphone.

  ‘Miss Cox,’ he said.

  She looked up, clearly a little ruffled.

  ‘Kafka’s definition of a lawyer is a person who writes a ten-thousand-word document and calls it a brief. If your attention span doesn’t extend to the relatively short time I’ve been speaking, you’ve likely chosen the wrong profession to pursue.’

  He watched her make a face and mouth: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

  A couple of days ago, he’d volunteered at the local federal public defender’s office to act pro bono for an alleged murderer, a young man named Johnny Hockey. A man, elements of the press were calling an anti-Semite, with offensive tattoos. His friends had shaken their heads, saying that the level of publicity it was generating wouldn’t do his career any good. What was he thinking? Hockey was accused of the murders of Jed and Esfir Watson.

  Gabriel had heard of Jed Watson and had seen the recent photos of him on TV, a mottled-skinned man with hair like blanched wheat. He’d risen to own a respected commodity brokerage in the Financial District after an unremarkable beginning as a photocopier salesman in Bowling Green, Kentucky. He’d been a philanthropist of the arts and a benefactor of numerous children’s charities, a friend of the mayor, no less. Esfir Watson had been a Russian beauty fifteen years her husband’s junior, a former ballerina at the Mikhaylovsky Theatre, with eyes the colour of a blue iceberg. She’d been known for her lavish fundraisers and aversion to scandal. The suspected racial motive was due to her religion. She’d been a Jew.

  Gabriel had done a short interview for CNN already, dismissing that allegation as unfounded. But he’d read the arrest report and knew that if the real reason he was representing Hockey was uncovered, it would both finish his career and threaten his personal safety.

  *

  Johnny Hockey and his misfit girlfriend, May, had been arrested in their rundown Bronx flat above a greengrocer’s shop, two days after the Watsons had been murdered. They’d lain together in the dark underneath a single white bedsheet, both dozing after their feverish lovemaking.

  Hockey was twenty-two, with a shaven head, his body heavily muscled. May was raw-boned, with short, spiky blonde hair. She was from Mississippi and he loved her accent. They’d drunk a crate of strong beer between them and had watched videos on YouTube, including one of historical footage of Waffen-SS troops in action, accompanied by the aggressive guitar riffs and violent lyrics of death metal.

  The FBI SWAT team had arrived at 5.03 am, dressed in black battle-dress uniforms, blast-resistant goggles, Kevlar helmets and ballistic body armour. A metal battering ram had been used to gain entry, the locked door flying off its rusted hinges. The beams from their torches had scanned every inch of the room, picking out discarded clothes and empty bottles, a standing plywood wardrobe. Following the mundane, there’d been the extreme: a Third Reich war ensign, a bronze bust of Hitler, an array of Wehrmacht replica weaponry.

  May had yelled obscenities at them and had been jerked to the floor for her outburst. She’d screwed up her face in an unsuccessful attempt to stop the bloated tears in her eyes from f
lowing. Her struggle had appeared obstinate rather than vicious, and she’d been subdued within a few seconds, wincing when the plastic flex-cuffs had bitten into her skin.

  Hockey had stayed silent, with his hands raised, a dull, alcohol-induced nausea in his upper abdomen and the back of his throat, a skull-cracking headache. He’d seen the tell-tale red dots skittering about the walls and intermingling with the torch beams. He’d known they’d flowed from lasers fixed onto Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine guns. There’d been no point in resisting.

  He’d been screamed at to lie face down on the floor. A rubber-soled boot had landed on the back of his knees, his arms pulled behind him and secured there with the disposable restraints. A female SWAT agent had crouched down, holding the barrel of a semi-automatic pistol next to his temple, so that he’d caught sight of it in his peripheral vison.

  She’d whispered: ‘You move an inch, I’ll put a round in your ear.’

  He’d seen May frogmarched from the room, her half naked body writhing with a mixture of distress and indignation. That had pushed him to the limits of his compliant mindset. He’d figured that he’d been betrayed by someone close to him. His own body had tensed then, barely able to contain the hate that coursed through his veins like acid.

  Later, at a local PD cell — a temporary measure, he’d been told — he’d consoled himself with the knowledge that the snitch would die screaming.

  *

  Summer Cox flicked back her strawberry blonde hair and straightened her yellow T-shirt, which was adorned with the head of a cartoon giraffe, its extravagant eyelashes halfway through a flutter, its generous mouth in a pout.

  She said, ‘Professor Hall, your point about empathizing with clients. What if they’re a racist? How does a lawyer empathize with someone like that, unless they have a bit of racism in them, too?’