Jacko

by Keneally, Thomas

  A wiry lieutenant, surely close to retirement, argued how it might be best if they put the mobile home under surveillance but – all things being equal – wait till dawn to stop Charles Kremmerling on his way to work. That would be away from the house, and they could be as aggressive as was warranted. Then they would visit the house and start to speak to the women. That would be all the better if it turned out that the red-haired wife was lying about her husband, punishing him maybe for a love triangle.

  Dannie, the lieutenant suggested, might want to put two camera crews in place to cover the near-simultaneous events.

  Dannie made calls to Vixen’s Los Angeles station, and it was all briskly arranged. A second crew was on its way.

  Since she also spent a certain amount of time staring at Jacko, Dannie’s accusation seemed clear. Invading Kremmerling’s home and finding him in mid-enslavement, with Sunny Sondquist hanging from some apparatus, would have required only one determined crew, the invincible crew of Dannie and Jacko. But Jacko hadn’t been willing to participate. Jacko had chosen, at the supreme hour, to go through channels.

  She said to him towards dawn, before both expeditions set out, I might have been utterly wrong about you, Jacko. I thought you had ambitions.

  At the end and beginning of everything, Jacko returned to the Ramada Inn in San Bernardino only long enough to deliver an expatiatory breakfast to Lucy. By then he had oodles in the can, even though these days there was no can, video tape being the medium. He had Charles Kremmerling being detained on his way to his regular employment at the joinery works. He had the police entering the mobile home and finding scraggy-haired, skinny Sunny Sondquist – identifiably Sunny despite all the horrors – preparing breakfast for the children. He had the astounding business of Joyce explaining things to dumbfounded Sunny, the long trick that had been played on her with the aid of dark, sound-proof boxes. And so was uncovered the furnished pit in the yard which contained stagnant water from the last rains, and a second pit half dug, the one Joyce had complained of in her earliest contacts with Lucy.

  At that point, Jacko told me, the children were sent out to play in the care of a young production intern from one of Vixen Six’s affiliates assigned to child-minding by a prescient Dannie. As the children’s cereal went flaccid in its bowls, limp-haired Sunny sat bonily at the kitchen table, suspicious of the strangers who had come tumbling in, wondering about their motives as well as their affiliations.

  Jacko, at that moment, suffered his gravest loss of faith.

  He simply couldn’t find any questions he wanted to ask of this girl. She could not say anything to enlighten anyone. Her case transcended the usual entertainment quotient of horrifying events. As Clayton filmed all that passed in the mobile home kitchen, Jacko envisaged Sunny at her mute father’s bedside in New York, imbued with the belief that everyone was in evil alliance, old Bob Sondquist too. Hadn’t he traded her to his captain to cover his old crimes?

  And so now, as the police sat with this wan girl, she conducted herself subtly within the bounds of the fable Kremmerling had, through his darkness and rites of discipline, imposed on her. His laughable tale of incorporated slavery.

  In what I have just written, my perhaps highfalutin idiom intrudes on Jacko’s, as it has many times in this account, but the sentiment is exact. For Jacko harboured now a fatal wish to leave Sunny Sondquist alone. For one thing, as everyone had promised, he could see her lips moving. As she waited to be interviewed, he passed her chair a few times just to be sure.

  —P-A-R-S-I-M-O-N-Y, parsimony, she was muttering the first time.

  —G-L-O-B-U-L-A-R, globular, the second.

  She seemed to repeat each exercise a number of times before moving deeper into the lexicon.

  A middle-aged woman who proved to be a police psychologist turned up in case she was needed to reassure either Joyce or Sunny. Against this woman’s wishes, but because Dannie was so persuasive, Jacko was allowed to sit beside her. She spoke to the girl, who slowly brought her gaze to bear.

  —This is not an interview. I just want you to feel comfortable …

  —I’m comfortable, said Sunny in a colourless voice.

  —Is it painful for you to remember what was done to you?

  Sunny shrugged and looked away.

  —Why are you asking me? she wanted to know. I remember most things.

  But she had made no furious denunciation of Kremmerling.

  She said, I always thought that it was better than being in the box. You know.

  Then she stared away. The psychologist looked at Jacko as if he might have some ideas.

  From Clayton’s side, Dannie whispered in the device in Jacko’s ear, confessing to being disappointed and having second thoughts.

  —I’m beginning to wonder about all this. He takes her to New York for Christ’s sake! And she comes back with him!

  Jacko however believed Sunny’s muteness somehow proved her case. He would later argue this and other points with Dannie.

  Dannie hissed in his ear, What’s wrong with you, Jacko? Rally, will you, bugger it all eh? Ask her if he hung her?

  So he did, and Sunny’s eyes slewed across all the men in the room. And, Jacko suspected, she believed most or all of these men hung and whipped women, and cased them up regularly in darkness. So why would they be interested in Kremmerling’s casual behaviour? This, she could be seen fearing, was a trick question, and Jacko perhaps the master of the random torturers.

  —Well, she said lowly. Hanging. Yes.

  The feel of the questions and answers was of clumsiness, for which Jacko himself was partly to blame.

  She answered it all so woodenly.

  —First he put a box over your head?

  —That’s right. It was very hot.

  —Didn’t you scream?

  —For the first few times. But one time he took it off and put it on his own head and showed me how nothing could be heard.

  —And during all this, he left you without clothes?

  —Yes.

  —But for how long?

  Not a mate or a love emerged in Jacko’s shocked diction.

  —Joyce says a few years the first time. Until he felt I was trustworthy.

  —And then he took you out and you went to work for him?

  —Yes.

  —And then he got scared and told you to stop work, and he dug a pit for you.

  —Yes. I spent some more time in the box first. Then out of it again. But he got worried what neighbours would think if I was around the house all the time. He got worried about his kids too. They were getting older … So he made the pit.

  Dull and wary, she continued to look for signs in Jacko that he was indeed a party in the conspiracy against her.

  Watching the interview a few days later, I felt again – communally with Sunny – the flush of black terror which had overtaken me in hospital. I exulted in her release. But such awful dreams! Cramped naked and prone in her body box. A blanket. A little container for human waste. Swallowing on the furry dark. Her spine wasting, her muscles atrophying. Spelling P-A-R-S-I-M-O-N-Y and G-L-O-B-U-L-A-R.

  She got the muscle tone back by jogging during her phases of liberation.

  When she finished talking, Jacko thanked her, nodded to Clayton to turn the lights off, and went to the men’s, leaving the psychologist to attempt to get more from Sunny. As he went he could hear Dannie complaining desperately to Clayton.

  —We’ll just have to do that segment again.

  But there was a kind of progress in train too. The wiry lieutenant and his detectives had a quiet talk to Joyce in the living room. They put before her the details of an earlier, unsolved crime: an undergraduate from UC Riverside found buried in Waterman Canyon. From the marks of constraint on her body, the surgeons surmised that this was a case of accidental death, at least in the mind of the male who had used her. It was to have been his purpose and his pleasure that she suffer and survive.

  Now, of course, the police urged Joyce to w
ork with them as a witness. In return she would not be charged with having concealed this early, fatal experiment by her husband.

  With the Live Wire crew filming all, the police were able to go calmly about the house retrieving instruments of torment: the head box out of a cupboard; the body box in which Sunny had spent some years of darkness from beneath the bed; the electric shock battery and its wires; and the hanging apparatus from a closet.

  —Okay, said Dannie, sure she could rely on Jacko now. Just show and tell with this stuff.

  —You mean the box and wires?

  —And the rest.

  On the kitchen table and floor were piled the box and the wires used for electric shock, Kremmerling’s straps, whips and knouts, the head box that opened and closed over a hapless neck.

  —Just hold on a tick eh, said Jacko.

  He took Dannie aside yet again. It seemed to have been a night and half a day of takings aside and hissed differences.

  —What’s the problem. You’re lying down on this damn story, Jacko, and it’s the best we’ve ever done. Pick up the bloody torture implements.

  —I reckon it’s enough to film them, Jacko argued. I don’t want to dignify them. There’s enough space given to dignifying things like this in this bloody country.

  —Oh, Jesus, beat us to death because we’re a demented nation. But you won’t even look professional if you don’t show and tell with those fucking things. Even Walter Cronkite would, for God’s sake.

  Jacko said, I’m not going to spend any breathless damn excitement on electrical boxes. Not ones used for purposes like that.

  —Hell, argued Dannie. Normal people love to hear this stuff. They’re entitled, because it confirms them in their normality. It makes them thank God for who they are.

  —You can say that all you bloody want, said Jacko.

  —And if you don’t say, and do it, you’re in the same camp as Jesse Helms and the moral majority and all those other shit-for-brains.

  Jacko said, I’ve come twelve thousand miles to find this kid with the butchered bloody soul. These instruments are evidence, but beyond that they’re sacred to her. I’m not going to paw them over.

  —What? yelled Dannie. What did you say?

  —It’s because this is the most important story … that’s the reason I won’t touch them.

  —Jesus, said Dannie, I can’t go on working with somebody like you.

  And Jacko realized that within her own terms, which were usually and comprehensively his own terms as well, she was utterly correct, and Durkin would ask him in the Perugia what had bloody-well happened, and advise him not to let it happen again.

  But Jacko kept refusing, and at last everyone packed up and went to the police station in town, where Kremmerling was already being held. I would ultimately see him on television: an angular man with no remarkable features. He looked like a man who might ask permission before proceeding with anything, a reliable, unindulgent fellow. These two impressions would serve him well in court, I surmised.

  Live Wire turned their attention to him and for some reason, he took to Jacko, the sober Jacko of this particular interview, the Jacko who, against his own preaching, seemed to achieve the solemnity required of current affairs programs on other networks. With Jacko, Kremmerling was like a man who had at last found a sympathetic ear. He had picked up this girl on impulse: his wife had persuaded him to do it because she wanted a baby and thought he should be compensated. Then, after he’d picked Ess up, he hadn’t known what to do with her. He knew he’d be in trouble if he let her go. So he built restraints. And then he found that the women were forming a conspiracy against him. He shook his head, a victim of unnatural, irrational, alliance-making tendencies of the sisterhood.

  When Jacko emerged from that interview, Sunny was sitting in a waiting room refusing coffee, being careful of her caffeine intake, just like the victim of an average tragedy. Durkin had already spoken to Basil Sutherland, and told Dannie by phone that she was authorized to offer Sunny Sondquist $60,000 for her story, exclusive rights to Vixen Six. Sunny too had been on the phone, speaking to her father, and they had wept on either end of the line. Jacko resisted making much of this call, given what he knew of old Bob. Nonetheless Clayton had filmed her making it. Now she wanted to call him again. The lieutenant let her into his office, and she called Bob Sondquist a second time, all with a strange untentativeness. She needed to seek his advice on this matter. She came out after a minute or two saying that Bob Sondquist wanted to speak to Jacko.

  Dannie felt she was the only one competent enough to deal with Bob, and followed Jacko into the office.

  Jacko, picking up the phone to Bob, found that Bob’s electronic monotone sounded authoritative now.

  —I have to thank you, Jacko. But I told Sunny she oughtn’t sign anything till she’s heard from the big networks. You found her. But I’ve got to advise her like a parent.

  —Let me talk to him, Dannie raged at Jacko’s elbow. Crazed with sleeplessness and having already taken enough rubbish from Jacko, she was ready to flay Bob Sondquist.

  —Bob, said Jacko calmly, and again his tone infuriated Dannie, since this was certainly an hour to fulminate, and all he was doing was chatting.

  —Bob, you can certainly get $100,000 from one of the networks. You might get more. But they’d want a share of book and movie rights as well. Does she want all that? Do you want it for her eh? They’d pay her a heap, mate, but use her to death. They’d have her making fucking sneaker commercials eh. But it’s not what she needs. We’re giving her maybe $60,000 for one long interview, no other rights involved. I’m sure you wish, like me Bob, that she could buy some time back with it. But one long interview, and then she’ll never have to mention it again to anyone unless she wants to.

  —That isn’t what the agreement will say, Dannie whispered.

  An agreement transmitted by Durkin was already on its way by fax.

  Bob Sondquist said he wanted to talk to an entertainment lawyer.

  —What? What is he saying? Dannie asked.

  Jacko covered the mouthpiece, told her briefly, but did not wait for a reply before addressing Sunny’s father again.

  —Bob, he reasoned, by all means speak to an entertainment lawyer, but ignore everything the bugger says. Because when it’s all said and done, what are you going to tell him? Are you going to tell him you traded your kid to that captain at Page Air Force Base?

  Bob Sondquist uttered an electronic protest down the line from New York.

  —See, Jacko persisted, in some terms that would explain what happened to poor bloody little Sunny, wouldn’t it? It would show how she was set up to take as normal the sort of rubbish that bastard Kremmerling tried on her. It’d explain – wouldn’t it eh? – how she was ready for any old rubbishy story. Because she’d already heard them all from you, Bobby, old son.

  After weeping for a few seconds, as so many people had in that night of tears, Bob gathered himself. He began to argue in his unearthly diction that Sunny was entitled precisely because of all that! His affliction did not allow contrition to be audible in his voice, and maybe that was both his punishment and his deliverance. For he might be able to reassure himself secretly that the man with the cruel squawk was not the same man who’d sold his child.

  She deserved compensation from him, said Bob, and from others. But television had helped make the world crazy, and they should pay their share.

  Jacko found himself laughing, and consumed by a great impatience.

  —Listen, listen to me, Bob old mate. You’ve got the California State Victims’ Fund to go to. And we’ll give her solid money. You sign on with us, and one interview and she’ll become a forgotten woman, as she should be eh. When the trial comes up, of course, it’ll be a different matter, poor little bugger. But I’m telling you this straight up, the alternative is, we trump whatever the networks do with this story with one about you, about cozy old Bob on the fourteenth floor and what a dead shit he was when his daughter was
a kid. I’ll do it, mate. I tell you I’ll bloody do it.

  By these means, it was established quickly enough that Jacko and Vixen Six would reap the ratings inherent in Sunny Sondquist, Charles Kremmerling’s hapless slave.

  Bob asked again to speak to his daughter.

  So Jacko stormed to the fax machine at the police station, seized the agreement from Durkin, and with Dannie looking on and protesting, ran a line through all the subsidiary rights Vixen routinely and hungrily desired a share of – the film, book, comic book, electronic image, television drama and physical representation (T-shirt and coffee mug) rights.

  —You’ve gone fucking psycho! Dannie cried.

  Agreement in hand, saying nothing while Dannie raged, Jacko sat outside the lieutenant’s office, waiting for Sunny to emerge and sign.

  17

  There was a disturbing news story I saw one night in New York, soon after Kremmerling’s arrest, a story in which the San Bernardino County Supervisor questioned whether the county could afford the trial against Charles Kremmerling. It could cost, he said, five hundred thousand dollars, and this could mean some forty or so county workers would need to be retrenched.

  —Here we have, he announced, a case which will be long-winded: an alleged victim who was allowed to go jogging and who was taken to New York by the supposed perpetrator, and even held a job for a time, and never took her chance to escape! To make the case stick, the county will need to use expert witnesses and all that’s highly expensive …

  He sternly argued that the District Attorney’s office should weigh the chance of a conviction against a possible loss of forty family incomes.

  This plea arose in the wake of Jacko’s curiously touching two-part interview with Sunny. She spoke in a neutral voice, a voice so drained of feeling that some people thought she was lying, and only those who had had a glimpse of victimhood saw it as the voice fit for her condition and her tale. She mousily confessed to having been kidnapped, enclosed in a head box, then in the body box, then in a pit; to having been suspended by the wrists or else stretched on a cunning table Charles Kremmerling had constructed; to having been forced to perform intimate favours and undergo intimate sufferings for her dominator. And throughout, Jacko seemed stricken. It was as if he felt the terrors as closely as I had during my startling nightmares in St Vincent’s.