by Rex Miller
“I don't see why not.” The eyebrows shot up again. “She has no—” A nurse came in with a folder. “Oh, good. Thanks.” He got up, taking the folder, opening it up right there in front of Kamen.
“See, she has acute rheumatoid arthritis in the arm and the prosthesis was causing a great deal of pain.” Kamen was beginning to wonder if perhaps this was all paranoia. What if he called the hospital and Mrs. Purdy was all right after all? He'd feel like a total imbecile. Hospitalization would explain why she hadn't called back. He'd just called the man a Nazi bastard.
“This is as I thought,” Royal continued. “She was admitted to Barnes about three weeks ago. Here's the report based on our X rays. There's the note about our admission and, you see, there's her present room number.
The Nazi hunter was an experienced, tough, resolute fighter, and he was not a stupid man. In theory, he could never be so easily deceived. But theory and real life are often far different birds, and who better to convince and lull and mislead and persuade than the ultimate method actor, the man or woman with more than one personality? Shtolz, long subjugated and submerged, was a genius as well as a murderer, and Aaron Kamen alone was no match for him. Shtolz, the real inner being, came snaking out of Solomon Royal's twisted mind and killed the man in a few heartbeats.
There were calming, reassuring words. Cleverly manufactured facts detailing the seriousness of the absent Mrs. Purdy's arthritic pain, a smokescreen of doctors and nurses and medical initialspeak, a convenience of contrived history swirled in front of Kamen's tired eyes. It might be argued that had he felt better he would have proved to be a more worthy adversary. But Emil Shtolz, brilliant butcher of the secret Himmler breeding farms, was fighting for his life.
He kept the thing under his desk in the office. There was one in his car, one in the bedroom, another here. Over the years he'd become proficient with them. He thought of them as his brass knuckles, but they were far more than that. Protrusions came between the fingers, a heavy tube was clenched in the palm, and the hard, sharpened striking surfaces protruded from top and bottom. Shtolz no longer remembered the name of the weapons, which he also used as grip strengtheners.
It was the simplest move to slide his right hand into the one beneath the desk, pulling the file off with two hands as he stood, speaking as he moved, the right thumb visible on the file folder, the left hand with the papers now crossing over the right as he handed the folder to Kamen, right hand curling around the powerful knuckles, focusing on a spot a foot in space beyond the man's head—hands moving, right hand at the left shoulder, weight into the blow, expert knowledge of anatomy targeting the hard striking surface as the extended fist smashed into Kamen's temple.
Even a person in his sixties, without great strength, striking a lightning-fast blow with such an instrument, can traumatize the brain with four thousand to forty-five hundred foot-pounds of pressure per square inch. It is a devastating blow to the head.
Shtolz had emerged to direct the movements of Solomon Royal the moment he sensed danger. The evil genius soaked the situation in through his pores, every movement geared to that moment when he could lash out at this intruder.
From the second he thought he'd been spotted by the old woman and he first realized that she recognized him, the long-dormant survival instincts had been reawakened. Since then, he'd been constantly prepared for and attuned to the other hunters that he knew would be coming.
He'd known when his girl had closed the door he would be safe. He kept up his soft-shoe routine, speaking to the man even as he moved, talking about the woman's prosthesis as he took the syringe out, deftly seeking and finding a vein and plunging the hypodermic needle in, filling the unconscious Jew's veins with enough morphine to kill three men.
Now the adrenals were activated and he felt the erotic charge surge through his own system, as if he'd shot the dope into his own veins, and the apprehension, excitement, and pleasure of supremacy gave him the power he needed to work the heavy body into his private closet.
He opened the office side door that faced a corner of the rainy parking lot, then, leaving it ajar, quickly opened the door of his office, and, seeing the hallway empty, he faced the parking lot and said in a loud voice, “No problem. I think she'll be fine. Give me a call if she needs anything.” A pause and a glance back at the open office door. “Okay. So long.” He slammed the private door much louder than necessary, immediately going back down the hallway for his next patient, thinking a dozen thoughts as he quickly sorted and compartmentalized his options.
His main regret was not that someone had come for him but that he had felt unwilling to gamble. He regretted that he could not afford the risk of keeping this solitary hunter alive for interrogation later. Aside from the pleasures of the inquiry and what would follow, it would almost have been worth the gamble to know for certain who else knew about his existence.
There would be a vehicle in the parking lot to contend with. Keys in the man's pocket would doubtless fit the ignition. He silently examined these dangerous intrusions and inconveniences, as he assessed the risks of his plan.
In the slimy darkness of his mind he felt the blood and tissue fleck his face as it flew from the bone saw, savoring the climax of the evening ahead.
When he'd spent a few minutes with a woman whose kidney infection could be treated with a simple urine analysis, routine diet, and prescribed antibiotics, he returned to his office and considered the problems at hand.
There was his fictitious Purdy folder there in the clinic files, now conveniently misplaced, but which had been prepared and filed, initialed and charted by a part-time employee who worked only one day a week and would remember nothing. The Medcor computer carried Alma Purdy's fictional record of office visits, diagnostic entries, lab work, and treatment summary. When the chart was found it would show she had known Dr. Royal for over a year, and it would prove adequate unless the woman's records turned up in the files of another doctor.
He'd invented a rather well documented condition of aggravated arthritic pain to explain the spurious history of past visits. The X rays of a prosthesis-wearer's amputated arm, which he'd inserted into her chart, were a particularly nice touch.
That evening, after the clinic was empty but before the nighttime custodial people arrived, he backed Kamen's car up to the office side door and, under cover of his privacy wall in back of the clinic, loaded the body into the trunk. After that it would briefly occupy part of the two-car garage in Royal's empty rental property a few blocks away. From there the late Mr. Kamen would go to dwell in the newly planted “garden” in Royal's basement, perhaps not all at once, but piecemeal.
The contents of the Hebe's briefcase were nothing: ancient, blurry photos, renderings that resembled Dr. Royal not in the least, notes of haphazard conjecture, fumbling guesswork. He could imagine what the regional law agencies had. Little or nothing. The object mailed by Mrs. Talianoff remained a small, loose cannon.
The car itself would also present no problem. Without undue trouble he could drive the vehicle out to the backwater's edge after dark. Leave it at the edge of the incoming river. Plan a nearby house call. Invent some car trouble. His patients wouldn't blink an eye if he requested a lift into town. Nothing major, much less insurmountable.
It was past his bedtime and he was physically exhausted but his keen mind still turned over variables. He knew the woman had alerted this Aaron Kamen, who would have taken his story to the authorities, but so what? This was no spearhead of a search team from the K-group or the Mossad. This was an old crone and an inept amateur. Two moron Jews.
His Royal identity, in concert with cosmetic surgery, his language proficiency, intellect, and background in the community, they amounted to an impenetrable shield. It was best not to plan these things out too painstakingly, he supposed. Weigh the probabilities of course, but let the element of chance factor itself into the mix to some extent. Go with the harmonics.
He decided he'd take a Seconal or two, almost too exhaust
ed to sleep, and within a few minutes was slumbering peacefully.
32
Kansas City
She'd started trying to reach her father by phone late Saturday, calling him a number of times Sunday afternoon and evening, and then putting it out of her mind Monday, with the pressures of work to contend with. But the fact he'd been out of touch all weekend tugged subliminally, and by late afternoon Monday, Sharon started calling the motel in earnest. No answer. That night she dialed several times again. Nothing.
She tried to read. Listen to music. Paint. She couldn't disengage her mind. How could her father get lost in Bayou City?
At times like this, as she prowled her apartment, feeling the walls closing in on her a bit, she would get quick, uncomfortable flashes of insight into just how much damage had been done to her psyche by the thing at the shelter.
The cop and his ominous warnings about sticking to her story of the shooting ... the cold formalities with the police interviews that left her feeling dirty and confused ... the frightening business of having to get legal counsel and then depose ... stand trial ... terrifying moments after long months of waiting. When she was finally exonerated there was no sense of real relief, only anticlimax. The guilt was still with her, the feelings that a self-defense acquittal could never expunge. At such moments as these she'd realize how far she still had to come to shake loose from it.
At 9:48 P.M., after the fifth call of the evening, letting it ring twenty times or more, she rang the Bayou City motel office, asking the manager to make sure her father was all right. After some discussion, the woman relented and took a passkey, returning after what seemed like ten minutes to the telephone that Sharon insisted she not hang up.
“Hello?"
“I'm still here."
“Well, Mr. Kamen apparently hasn't been back to his room for a day or so."
“Why do you say that?"
“Because our maid didn't show up today and I had to do all the beds and clean the rooms myself. His bed is still made up from the weekend and I don't think he's been back in the room."
She thanked the woman, and as soon as she had a dial tone tried the Bayou City police. A deputy or assistant of some sort answered and she asked for the person in charge, was told he wasn't available, and was given the opportunity of leaving a message. She explained the nature of the emergency, the fact that her father, who was looking into the disappearance of a Bayou City resident, had not returned to his motel room for at least two days. The man on the other end was maddeningly calm and infuriatingly placating in tone.
Think! What should she do first? She phoned her superior at the Coalition and briefly explained the situation. She would have to-leave immediately. Could she please arrange to notify the office? They'd cover her absence and handle everything. She assured her boss she'd call as soon as she knew something, rang off, and dialed the motel again, telling the manager not to worry if the police contacted them. It didn't necessarily mean anything bad. Her dad had been conducting a private investigation and may have simply become too involved to return, and so forth.
Sharon forced herself to breathe deeply, count to ten, and get hold of her emotions. She suddenly felt as if she were coming apart at the seams. It was absurd. Her dad would show up tomorrow with an explanation and tell her she'd been childish to worry. She was behaving idiotically.
She went in and started doing every dirty dish in the place, realizing, as she wiped plates and utensils, she'd been grinding her teeth together. She unclenched her jaw and went into the bedroom and started throwing things into a bag, including the packages and mail she'd picked up from her father's apartment during the noon hour—a whirlwind of movement, churning inside.
By 10:45 P.M. she was on her way to an all-night service station, pulling into the self-service lane, getting out, unlocking the gas cap, so nervous she could hardly disengage the pump, hands shaking.
Sharon chilled at the mental image of her dad saying “I'm on to one of the big boys,” the phrase immediately filling her with the helplessness she always experienced when he talked about the war criminals. “I smell a rat."
“Someone around here?” she'd asked.
“Down in the Bootheel,” he'd told her, referring to the southernmost tip of the state.
But her worst moment was yet to come. Maybe an hour later, driving in a semi-trance, it occurred to Sharon that the first thing the police in Bayou City would do would be to check her out, and they'd discover she'd shot and killed a man.
She played with that one half the way to Bayou City.
33
Bayou City
Sleep came like an old, comfortable pair of pajamas one pulls on and encased him in a blanket of warm and seductive familiarity. There was the period of the body's surcease from labor, regeneration, and as he gave himself easily to it, his thoughts became a mosaic of assimilated memory. If he remembered the beginnings of the dream he would attribute it to a clumsy piece he'd been reading. The image of comfortable pajamas and the acronym for the Journal of the American Medical Association converged and pooled into a pa-JAMA shape, as the article on deanimation coagulants and neuro-suspension melted toward the fringe of a dream. It was a natural bridge to transfusion and discorporation techniques and his mind made the jump, then to the DNA breakthroughs of some decades later, placing the history around his own contributions.
Early in the morning he penetrated the inversion layer and a question rattled through the corridors of his sleeping consciousness. Does he see something? Is it shadow or bloodsplatter? He sees it above him.
Dreaming below a wall hanging that appears to depict acquatic Lentibulariaceae, alive with vesicular floats and hungry insect traps, he imagined his own eyeblink and pulse rapidity. The appalling grotesquerie under which he slumbered drooped, festooned, bulged obscenely, swagged in the center as the billowing middle of it loomed drippingly above his face. The chameleon's eye blinked and the bladderwort dripped into his snoring, open mouth. His shoulder burned, ached. Involuntarily, he swallowed.
How could he fail to recognize the unmistakably salty, metallic bloodtaste? Flanking the drippy Utricularia, the wall above his bed was splattered red with arterial fluid, veiny crimson, dark scarlet lifejuice. He knew full well that it was hers ... her blood, gore, and grue. He knew immediately he'd find her acephalous and dead beside him. His alert mind continued to catalog options, and map escape routes.
Sleep-cudgeled senses registered danger, intruder, violence. It shocked him out of his lethargy and he awakened and saw that it was only a wall hanging above him, that the splatter was naught but shadow, that the clutched object was a pillow not a child's torso with partial head, so for a second he thought it was all a dream. In the next eyeblink, in the next heartbeat, he remembered the details of the hag who recognized him and the Jew she sent to confront him. He knew which part was real now, and permitted himself to slide back down into the cradle of deep sleep.
He hoped he could conjure up the little girlchild, Marta, again. Pick up where he left off in a twisted fantasy, but stop it this time before the death scene. Linger with her, a fragment of delicious domination saved in his collection of monstrous artifacts, a small vignette of sadism he reinvented and played with over and over.
Emil Shtolz's self-protective urges and his pleasure-pain linkages made for restive bedfellows, however, and he could not fasten onto the pleasing parts of the dream. As he dropped back into sleep a corner of his sentient mind wondered who would come for him next. He supposed, incorrectly, it would be a policeman of some kind.
34
Bayou City
“Miss Kamen,” the police chief said, taking her hand, “I'm Jimmie Randall.” She shook his hand firmly. He sucked in his stomach slightly, a thing she noticed guys did sometimes when they saw her. She was too tired to be even faintly amused.
“I guess you got my message?” she asked.
“Yeah. I checked at the motel several times and left word. It doesn't look as if he's been back f
or two, three days. His clothes and things are still there."
“I know,” she said, starting to lose it.
“Listen,” he said, seeing that she was on the verge of tears, “we've got a quiet alert out for your father, but I want you to know that I am concerned.” He was picking up the phone even as he spoke calmly to her. He dialed.
She bit her lip, nodding, not knowing what to say. She watched him make his phone call.
“Lemme talk to the boss man. Thanks. Hey, bud, how's things? I have Sharon Kamen in my office.... Yeah...” A long pause. “I'm gonna call Bob.... Yeah. We have to bring ‘em all the way in now, I think.... Okay” He rang off and placed another call before he spoke to her again. “Bob Petergill, please. Bob, this is Jimmie Randall.... Fine. There's another development in the Shtolz business. Nobody's had any contact with Mr. Aaron Kamen for about three days it looks like. We got him in Sikeston—” he glanced over at a stack of notes on his desk. “Uh, let's see ... four days ago, or thereabouts. I think he may have, yes.” She didn't like the sound of that. “All right, sir. I'll be here.” He hung up the instrument.
“That's the head of the bureau in Cape,” he said. “We've got a real good relationship with the FBI here, Sharon, and we need to get all the big guns on this, I think. Might still be that your father is off somewhere and we'll find he's perfectly okay, you know?” She nodded again. She noticed he was no hick cop. In a few moments he'd done everything that could be done, passed the ball, put himself on a first name basis with her but not the other way around, and unless she'd misread him, he was now gently dismissing her.
She wasn't quite so easily finessed. She asked some more questions, most of them dumb, but at least she hadn't started sobbing. Mostly she found herself volunteering a lot of information about herself, the way one often does in a prolonged conversation with an experienced law officer. She decided the smart move would be to get a few hours’ sleep and begin anew. How lost could one get in Bayou City?
