Sins of the Flesh

by Colleen McCullough

  “And Fenella’s illness?”

  “She had a wasting disease—the word they used was strange to us—demyelinating. The use of her body was gradually taken from her, until she ended in an iron lung. That occurred at our seventeenth year, and there wasn’t anything we personally could do for her except sit by her bed. We’re not proud of running away, but that’s what we did—ran away. Death by inches over many years.”

  “How old was she?” Abe asked.

  “She was born in November of 1908, the same day her father, Angelo Carantonio, was killed at a railroad crossing. So in May of 1950 she was forty-two years old.” Rufus’s face contorted. “She looked a thousand.” Rufus gazed at Abe, a challenge in his eyes. “As far as I know, the police were never involved in her death. She’d been treated by a bunch of doctors for fifteen years.”

  “Thank you,” Abe said, defusing Rufus’s challenge with a winning smile. “I have to ask, honestly.”

  “Of course you do!” Rha cried. “Between your own case and that of the delicious Delia’s, Abe, you’re awash in missing persons of both sexes.” He rolled his eyes ceiling-ward. “Well, haven’t we all died to go missing at one time or another, as the bishop said when caught with the dancing-girl and both sets of knickers missing?”

  “That,” said Abe solemnly, “I’d give a lot to see. However, back to business. I’m adding Un Known and Dr. Nell Carantonio to our list of missing persons.”

  “May we have copies of the pictures, Abe darling?”

  “Calling me darling is an arrestable offense, so don’t.”

  “Oops!” from Rha, with an impenitent look.

  “Oh, Jesus!” Abe waved his hands in the air, and departed.

  Rha and Rufus stood in the foyer looking up at Fenella’s huge portrait, of a thin, anaemically fair young woman emerging from clouds of wispy white tulle.

  “What do we do now?” Rufus asked.

  “What can we do?”

  “At the very least, tell Ivy.”

  “That goes without saying, but there’s no one else, is there?”

  “Not in this present contretemps, anyway.”

  “Ivy will be terrified that it might all be dredged up again.”

  “If it is, it is,” Rha said, voice hard. “There can be no shelter from the elements this time. Abe Goldberg is too good.”

  While Abe made full sail, Delia was miserably aware that she lay on her oars still waiting for a wind. She had established that the person behind the camera taking studio shots of her Shadow Women had no professional ambitions; he shot for his own records, for no other reason. Now she had nothing left to do.

  After a lonely lunch she climbed into her cop unmarked and set out for HI and the Asylum, Jess having assured her that she was at a loose end herself, and would welcome company. Truth to tell, Delia felt like a drive, while Jess privately cursed time wasted on pleasantries.

  As prisons went the Asylum was not large; the original asylum had seen its inmates shockingly crowded together, and there had been 150 of them; when the huge renovations were completed in 1960, a hundred cells held a hundred inmates, one per cell, in a rigid framework far more stringent than even high security prisons. This was not a place where inmates had contact with each other; their physical fitness was ensured by small multiple gyms, and they ate in their cells, most of which were padded. Now that a few drugs were available to damp them down, caring for them was less dangerous, but it was not a place any of its staff would have called nice, or safe, to work in.

  It sat in fifteen acres of parklike ground, though the Asylum itself sat in two blocks, one to either side of the only gate, and HI sat three hundred yards down a sealed road in its own block; almost all of it was unused acreage. The reason lay in its walls, erected in 1836 by the inmates themselves, and so stoutly, thickly and impregnably that, even in 1960, by which time the land was valuable, no one in authority wanted to incur the cost of building new walls for a smaller area. The bastions enclosing the Asylum were thirty feet high, wide enough on top to take small wheeled vehicles, and contained ten watchtowers, each round in shape and twenty feet in diameter. At their base they were hollow, and in shape if looked down on from a helicopter, formed a teardrop whose thinner end saw the forest outside meet a relic of the same forest inside. A bleak place, it was a saucer that sat just within the Holloman County boundary on its northwestern side, where people had never much cared to live, between the dampness and the wind tunnel it formed whenever the wind blew from the inclement northern quarter. Allotment size around it stood at five acres, which meant forest hid all but its watchtowers from view.

  The entrance was on Millington, and looked every inch the prison it was: a massive iron gate that opened only to pass buses, machinery and big trucks; a smaller gate for cars, vans and little trucks; and a turnstiled door for pedestrians that led through a short tunnel. In the back, interior side of the walls were various reception rooms and offices, their guards armed with both pistols and semiautomatic rifles. Handy, that the hollow walls and their bigger watch towers could be used.

  Admitted when she showed her gold detective’s shield, Delia parked and then walked to her designated office, where she lodged her 9mm Parabellum pistol and her Saturday night special, and asked for Dr. Wainfleet in HI.

  HI had been built from scratch, and contrived to look somewhat classier than most public structures, though it was uninspiringly rectangular in shape and not overly glassed. What glass there was probably had to be toughened and shatterproof, considering the patient kinds, which would make it very expensive. Instead, walls had been faced with interesting stone by an architect who liked to do that type of thing, so as a look, it worked.

  The road down to HI from the Asylum curved and was deserted save for a patrol car cruising slowly past her going the same way; the only other soul in sight was on foot, and striding out toward her. Clad in a grey T-shirt and short shorts, he wore no shoes and seemed not to notice that the August sun was sending ripples off the gooey tar—the soles of his feet must be solid asbestos, she thought. A superb physical specimen with a military air about him, and impossible to think of as an inmate. Besides, inmates didn’t have the run of the grounds, even were one permanently in HI care. A handsome man too, she added as he drew near, still straight-faced. But no, he was after her! Three feet from her he stopped and nodded.

  “Sergeant Carstairs?” he asked.

  “I am she.”

  “Dr. Wainfleet asked me to fetch you. She’s not in her own office at the moment, but she’ll be there as soon as she can.”

  Perfect courtesy, yet no feeling. Who was he?

  “Who are you, sir?” she asked in polite tones.

  “Walter Jenkins. I’m Dr. Wainfleet’s aide.”

  “A pleasure to meet you, Mr. Jenkins.”

  After that they walked in silence. Jenkins settled Delia in a comfortable chair, brought her a mug of coffee far superior to most institutional brews, and would have left her to peruse the journals on the coffee table had she not lifted a friendly hand.

  “What does Dr. Wainfleet’s aide do?” she asked, smiling.

  His face registered no emotion; more, thought Delia, as if a few gears had to click around before the answer came up.

  “Coffee, first and foremost,” he said, but not in a joking manner. “I have memory skills she finds a great help—she says my memory and hers dovetail, and that their collective power is actually more than the sum of both added together.”

  “Isn’t that something called a gestalt?”

  “Yes, it is. Are you a psychiatrist?” He asked the question without evincing true curiosity, more as if he needed to keep the clicks and the gears going around.

  “Dear me, no! I’m in the police.”

  He nodded, swung on his heel and left too quickly for Delia to continue exploring him.

  Two minutes later Jess came in, Walter behind her with a fine china mug of coffee for her. She leaned over to peck Delia’s cheek, and gave her aide a
brilliant smile. “Thanks, Walter.” She glanced at Delia. “Have you got your car keys, or did you hand them over at the gate?”

  “I have them.”

  “Give them to Walter, he can drive your car down here to save you a walk in this awful sun. Is it your Mustang, or an unmarked?”

  “A blue Ford in slot 9,” she said, handing over the keys, and, as soon as he was out the door, “What an interesting man! I’d love to see what our new police artist would do with him in paints! Hank is heavily into robots.”

  All Jess’s unconscious little movements ceased as if struck by some psychic lightning bolt; the doed black eyes took on a startled, even alarmed look. “Robots?”

  “No, that’s too unkind a word for Mr. Jenkins. I apologize to his receding back, and he doing me such a kindness too!”

  “Why did you use the word robot?” Jess persisted.

  “His lack of warmth? Or do I mean emotion? He walked in bare feet across melting tar, Jess, and didn’t seem to feel pain. Perhaps what he reminded me of most vividly was the perfect soldier—you know, totally brave because totally fearless, unaffected by the niggling weeny things that get ordinary people so down. If you could clone him—isn’t that what the genetics boffins are aiming for, cloning?—the U.S. Army would be in seventh heaven.”

  “You make him sound like Frankenstein’s monster.”

  Delia stiffened. “Is he, Jess?”

  “No, but he is an inmate.” Jess bit her lip. “There, I’ve just given you information you’re not qualified to gauge or assess. Walter is top secret.”

  “Your secret’s safe with me, but explain.”

  “Walter was a genuine homicidal maniac, but over the course of four years I’ve unlocked the key to Walter’s syndrome, and I’ve effected a cure. He still has some way to go, but the Walter you see is a million miles from the Walter who used to be. On my authority and with Warden Hanrahan’s agreement, Walter has the run of the Asylum and its grounds—though of course he can never go outside the walls for as long as a millisecond. Everybody knows him and is cheering for him, and my team is ecstatic at my results. The trouble is that the cost of treating someone like Walter is nearly prohibitive, so before I can go any farther with my plans for Walter, I have to develop techniques that are more cost-effective. Todo and his tax dollar reign, and rightly so. But I guard Walter with my life. In a way, Walter is my life. That’s why your impression of Walter is so important. You didn’t pick him as an inmate, right?”

  “No, I didn’t. But I knew something was different,” Delia said, at a loss to explain adequately what she meant. “He reminded me of a slot machine. My asking him a question pulled his handle, but the dollar signs or cherries or clown heads had to clunk into a row before he answered. Always, I hasten to add, correctly.”

  “He’s improving—and that’s not wishful thinking!” Jess said. “I can’t be technical in my explanation to you, but in essence what I’m doing is forcing him to abandon the pathways his thought processes used to travel, and open up pathways he’s never touched before. Our brains are overloaded with alternative routes that seem to be there on a just-in-case premise. So Walter is drawing himself a new road map for his thoughts to travel, and I’m its designer-architect. His old paths ended in horrific dead ends, but his new paths have benign and logical destinies.”

  Her own mind was spinning, so much so that suddenly Delia knew it was time for her to go. If she stayed, she might end in being drawn too deeply into the controversy she could see around Walter Jenkin’s profoundly disturbed head.

  “I think I hear my pager,” she said, picked up her handbag from the floor, and went rummaging inside. Encountering the pager, she made it buzz, then consulted it anxiously. “Oh, bugger!” she said. “I’m needed, and just when I was settling in.”

  “At least your car will be closer. Walter will come in with your keys any second,” said Jess, delighted to be liberated. Ari Melos had warned her, she reflected, that she was getting too close to Walter to see him in perspective. She should have seen these flaws in Walter, but hadn’t. Therefore she was becoming Walter habituated. Only how to dishabituate herself? He wasn’t ready yet to go a single day without seeing her; when she had taken her 1968 vacation, Walter had gone back to the Asylum, and it had set him back sufficiently for her to postpone 1969’s vacation, speak of putting it off until spring of next year.

  When Delia walked out of HI’s front door she found her cop unmarked parked there, and Dr. Ari Melos just pulling up.

  “Have I missed your presence, Sergeant?” he asked, climbing out of his car without bothering to lock it.

  “My beeper went off, alas. Saturday night was wonderful, yes?”

  “Emphatically yes.”

  “I’ve just met an interesting member of your team.”

  “Really? Who?”

  “Walter Jenkins.”

  “An astonishing case,” Melos said smoothly.

  “Ought he to be wandering unsupervised?”

  “His papers are marked never to be released, but that, we all agree, means from inside these prison walls. Walter is no longer homicidal, and even in the worst of his furors he was as cold as the North Pole. Guards on foot are collected in groups of five and are armed to the teeth. He is safely contained, Sergeant, I do assure you. In fact, Walter is the best reason for existence that HI could ever have.” He looked suddenly perturbed. “You do not, I trust, intend to lodge a complaint?”

  “Dear me, no. If Dr. Wainfleet says Walter is safe, then I accept that Walter is safe.”

  She climbed in and drove away, surprised to discover that Walter, who must almost have amputated himself at the midriff when he tried to slide behind the wheel, had made the adjustments necessary to drive the car himself, driven it, parked it, and then put her seat back exactly where it had been. Few people playing with a full deck did that, she reflected, so whatever Jess had done to Walter’s cards, they now certainly seemed the full number.

  And Walter, watching her drive back to the gate from his window on the second floor, assessed what he had learned about the tiny, tubby woman who drove it. To all intents and purposes it was her car, he had decided; it didn’t have a cop car look or smell to it, whereas its servicing stickers were the Holloman PD garage, so it definitely was a cop car. Nor did she herself fit the standards—height, weight, health—too little on all counts. So what did she have that the head honchos all valued enough to wink at standards? She carried a 9mm hand gun and a .22, probably a little lady’s two-shot handbag job, silver-plated and pearl-handled; he found spare magazines and a box of .22s in the arm rest between the front bucket seats, together with a bottle of spring water, two bars of dark chocolate and two folded cloths. The glove box held maps, a first aid kit, a Connecticut road atlas, the car’s papers and a spare pair of shoes, each in a drawstring cotton bag. Neat lady, permissibly obsessive. The book she was reading, Carl Sandburg’s biography of Abraham Lincoln, lay on the passenger seat. According to her bookmark, she was about halfway through the volume.

  She was the Enemy. That status had nothing to do with her cop activities or career; it sprang out of his instinct that Jess was beginning to develop a weird need of her. He didn’t know what to name the whatever-it-was Jess was starting to feel, nor could he predict its outcome. It simply was, and a part of it was an enormous threat to him. He knew that he mattered to Jess more than the rest of her world put together, and that Delia’s threat was outside of his importance to Jess. No, what he sensed was that Delia would pluck at a loose end to remove it as unwanted—and end in unraveling everything. She introduced an unknown factor into Walter’s life in a way that Ivy Ramsbottom never had, but it wasn’t because she was a cop.

  Not yet, for all his copious reading, able to find metaphors for what he felt or how he felt, he had climbed into a metaphor that saw him flying on gauzy wings high above a mass of crawling insects. Jess had enabled him to get this far, she had shown him a world of thoughts, and his gratitude was so great that he
would have done anything for her—anything! Now Delia Carstairs was moving into his space, and he couldn’t discuss her with Jess; he had to work out for himself what her significance was. For if he asked Jess, he would show Jess too much, betray open pathways on his map that she had no idea were open. Was Delia a superhighway bypassing his own desperate efforts to stay flying on gauzy wings? Whatever else he discounted, Walter could never make light of the solitude around him. Didn’t Jess tell him every day that he wasn’t enough, that she needed at least one other? One other what? He used to think she meant, one other like him, until she began to say he was unique; after that, he didn’t honestly know. Did she mean a Delia?

  Oh, he could see pathways everywhere! But which were the right ones? He couldn’t read the street names!

  “Walter, are you all right?” Jess was asking as she stood in his doorway.

  “I’m having trouble with some of the new pathways,” he said.

  “May I come in?”

  “Sure, please.”

  She sat in the armchair by his window, one hand gesturing to its mate, opposite. “Sit, Walter.”

  He sat, but stiffly. “Where will I start, Jess?”

  “Anywhere.”

  “Why aren’t I enough?”

  “In one way, you’re as many millions of enoughs as there are stars in the Milky Way, Walter,” she said in the voice she kept for him alone, soft and warm, “but where you yourself aren’t enough lies in other people, not in me. I need someone else to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that what I did to set you straight, I can also do to other people like you.”