by Philip Kerr
He shrugged quickly. ‘I envy them.’ His grin widened. ‘I owe you my life, I suppose. But tell me, what were you saving me for?’
‘There are rules in my game too,’ Jake said. ‘It isn’t a proper game if there is some vagueness in the rules. You, of all people, should realise that.’
He sighed and nodded. ‘Yes, you’re right I suppose.’ His smile returned. ‘You know, you’ve done me a real favour, bringing me this little hyacinth. I’ve been racking my brain for a strapline of less than 150 characters, to put on my drawer’s computer screen. One of the condemned man’s last little privileges. Too generous. The gentlemen here have been reading me some of the other convicts’ lines in the hope that I might be able to decide what I wanted.’ He groaned and rolled his eyes. ‘Of course, most of them are impossibly sentimental. The average criminal has a rather vulgar turn of phrase, especially when it relates to how he wishes to be remembered. But you have inspired me with this flower of yours. Thank you.’
‘What words are you going to have?’
‘Surprise,’ he said. ‘Read my drawer in a couple of hours.’
‘I’m sorry about ... all this. Really I am.’
He shook his head dismissively. ‘Will you do me a service?’
‘If I can.’
‘I understand that it is permitted to visit someone who is in a coma. Gardeners say that if you talk to a plant then it will thrive. Would you come and talk to me now and again?’
Jake shrugged. ‘What shall I say?’
‘Name things. Talk about them. Refer to them in talk. As if there were only one thing called “talking about a thing”. Speak to me as if you were a little girl talking to her doll. You owe me that much for keeping me alive. Will you do this?’
‘I never much liked dolls,’ said Jake. ‘But I’ll make an exception in your case.’
He seemed relieved by this assurance.
Finally she asked him why he had done it. What was it that had motivated him to kill all those men?
The bright eyes rolled heavenwards. His accent suddenly turned American.
‘My motivation?’ He smiled laconically. ‘Well gee, it was all based on my inner emotional experience I guess, discovered through the medium of improvisation.’ He shook his head. ‘Motivation ... You make me sound like Lee Strasberg, for God’s sake. People always ask a killer that question, Jake. “Say, Cody, what made you do it? What made you go and kill all those women?” They must get so tired of being asked that question, and not finding much of an answer. Embarrassing for them. They ruin their lives and don’t even have a good explanation for it. So after a while, they try and think of some kind of explanation, just to get people off their backs. And what do they say, these killers? “I had visions of Christ and all his angels telling me to do it.” Or, “The voice of Allah spoke to me and told me to kill the infidels”. But you know, this kind of explanation goes right back to man’s beginnings and was first employed by Abraham. “God told me to kill my son, Isaac, and I was going to do it.” How lucky for Abraham that he heard His voice again, and stopped short of murder.
‘Today, when we accept that a killer believes what he says to be true, that religious defence strikes as being evidence of his insanity. And if we think he’s bogus and that he’s lying about having heard a voice, then we go ahead and jab him. But whichever one applies, this kind of explanation for committing such appalling crimes remains generally comprehensible to us. It’s not particularly original, but we can readily accept that there would surely have to be some extraordinary explanation to do something as heinous as kill your mother and your father and your own puppy dog. In a sense, it’s the only explanation which people can understand.’ Esterhazy smiled to himself and looked distant for a moment.
‘But if you want an explanation that’s better suited to these modern times, Jake, I’ll give you one. If the absence of logic is what characterises faith, then the opposite also holds true. Where one has faith in nothing, then there is only logic that’s left to answer to. So just as another man might have claimed that God made him kill twelve men in cold blood, I’m saying that it was not the voice of God which made me do it, but the voice of Logic. I heard the voice of Logic and his ministers of Reason and I had this compulsion to kill.’ He smiled wryly. ‘It’s a different kind of madness, that’s all.
‘But you’ve read the notebooks, haven’t you?’ He shrugged eloquently. ‘What do you think? You’re the detective. This was your investigation. You caught me. You must have the answers. It’s you who have restored the moral order to a world that was temporarily upset by my crimes. How very Shakespearean of you, Jake. Perhaps it’s me who should be asking you questions. Well, what do you think, Chief Inspector?’
Jake shrugged. ‘Any restoration such as you describe would be an illusion, in my opinion,’ she said. ‘You ought to know all about illusion, Paul. Look at you, spending half your life with that Reality Approximation machine. Even now you might believe that you’re still wearing your RA suit and helmet. If I have an explanation at all, it’s that you can no longer distinguish between what is real and what is unreal. But that doesn’t make you so very different from a lot of other people. Nobody cares much for reality anymore. Maybe they never did. Is that what you would call a moral order? If you ask me, there’s not much balance around anywhere. And this — this investigation was just a holding action. Until the next time.’
They didn’t say much more after that. For a few moments she sat in silence and let him hold her hand. She tried to remember the last time she had held a man’s hand. Her father had tried to hold her hand as he lay dying in hospital and she had pulled away. Things were different now. She had stopped hating. It was time to be compassionate. To care. Maybe even to love.
Jake left him alone during the few minutes which remained. She would have left the prison if she could. She had no stomach for what was to follow. But the provisions of Homicide (Punishment of Murderers) Act 2005 required that, as senior investigating officer, she be present when the sentence was carried out.
Watched by almost twenty people, to say nothing of the millions watching on television, Esterhazy met his punishment as bravely as was possible, considering that he was already strapped down onto a hospital trolley when the coma technician produced the hypodermic. There was an audible gasp among two or three of the spectators as the needle caught the light from the glass ceiling like an upturned sword. Esterhazy turned his head away from the television camera and waited in silence. The technician swabbed his neck with a piece of cotton wool and the air was filled with the scent of something antiseptic.
The prison clock was still striking midnight as the needle entered his jugular vein and the plunger was depressed. Coma was almost instantaneous.
Next the body was wheeled into the main storage hall, and under the huge eye, it was transferred to the waiting drawer. Electric wires and pipes were attached to Esterhazy’s naked torso, and when everything was in place and working to the coma technician’s satisfaction, the drawer was pushed smoothly shut.
Jake waited until the television cameras had gone before moving in closer to read what the technician was typing on the screen: Esterhazy’s epitaph. She recognised it as some lines from The Waste Land, the ones which followed the hyacinth girl.
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Oed’ und leer das Meer.
Jake wiped the tear from her eye, collected the hyacinth, and went out into the sunshine.
What can I tell you about what it was like, lying in that drawer one lifetime, and then gone somewhere else, I don’t know where? How can I describe it to you?
The picture is something like this. Though the ether is filled with vibrations the world is dark. But one day man opens his seeing eye, and there is light.
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Philip Kerr, A Philosophical Investigation: A Novel
