Till Kingdom Come

by Andrej Nikolaidis

  Then there was a poet who, after his works were translated into French, believed he was important and went on to complain to the Paris newspapers about the lack of democracy in his native country, after which he was recruited by the French secret service. Wordsmiths are naturally rapturous, and therefore careless, and it seems this fellow was pondering a new poem when he fell from Dubrovnik’s walls in an ill-starred moment.

  In another case, a former member of the Yugoslav parliament committed suicide in Oslo, where he had followed his male lover, leaving behind a wife and two children. Norwegian newspapers mentioned that the confidential documents he had brought with him from Yugoslavia and offered to the Norwegian secret service in exchange for citizenship, were not found in the flat he had rented and where he put a small-calibre bullet through his own brain.

  There was also a successful German businessman, the son of a Serbian Chetnik officer, who was not satisfied with producing quality shoes for an affordable price but wanted to sell weapons to Libya, where no wise man would do business because the Yugoslav state was already the exclusive supplier of military hardware. He died in a fatal accident in a Munich airport toilet – electrocuted when he plugged his shaver into a faulty socket. As a result, twenty workers at the airport were laid off.

  And so on: The same story in every city on Olga’s photos.

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  The only place where Olga supposedly had her photograph taken more than once was in the Queen Mary’s Rose Garden in Regent’s Park, London.

  The faked photos showed Olga Pavlović standing next to a rose bush named Ingrid Bergman. I easily found that place; at the very entrance to the rose garden, where the first rose bush bears the actress’s name. I stood in front of the little sign and wondered what this could possibly mean. The thought flashed through my mind that my mother’s fate might have been in some way similar to that of the figure Bergman plays in Hitchcock’s Notorious, but I had no time for that theory.

  The rose garden has a small lake, and two photos showed Olga feeding the ducks. I stood on the bank and looked into the turbid water, but that told me nothing. The ducks were well fed.

  Disappointed with my visit to Regent’s Park, into which I had strolled full of optimism and came out of knowing even less than before, I decided to go back to the Moroccan’s at Red Lion Square for some tea.

  Tired and thirsty from the half-hour walk, I sat down at one of the familiar green plastic tables. A young couple next to me was loudly slurping the soup with meatballs and cinnamon. They were hungry that was plain, for the daughters were constantly bringing them new dishes. I discreetly examined the pile of food on their table. He bolted down couscous, while she attacked bun after bun, licking her fingers and even managing to drag them through the tahini in her gluttony. I ordered another pot of mint tea, lit a cigarette and mused that few things are more repulsive than people who eat like voracious animals – perhaps only people who drink like a fish.

  Freud’s lady friend from Conway Hall crossed the square with a takeaway cup of Starbucks coffee. Then the Moroccan came up to me, smiling amiably.

  “Ah, my favourite guest!” he said.

  “You remember me?” I asked.

  ‘Of course: You stayed here nearby, at the October Gallery,” he confirmed. “Am I mistaken? ‘A comfortably appointed apartment the size of a matchbox’, you said when you dropped in for coffee in the morning. You told me where you stayed the night and I asked what the accommodation was like. I was curious because I’ve had guests who have enquired about the place. Many of my guests ask me to tell them about Cromwell. But you’re different to all the others – you were so completely fascinated by the story about the publican who hid Cromwell’s body from the soldiers on the square! How could I forget? You wrote down what I told you in a blue notebook with a golden emblem just like the one poking out of your rucksack. That’s how I remembered you, it’s not every day that a man listens to the story about the hidden grave as if it was the greatest secret in the universe,” I said these very words to myself a second before he spoke them.

  Then, as I knew he would, he asked “More tea?” as he shook my hand and apologized for having to leave me.

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  Mandušić sacked me. His secretary called and conveyed the threat in a sugar-sweet voice: “The boss asks that you not try to contact him any more. He advises you not to talk to anyone about the details of your business relationship, and certainly not to write about it. The boss has been kind and approved a type of severance pay; you’ll receive your pay as usual for one year more.”

  And so Mandušić vanished from my life, along with all those marvellous bottles of single malt he sent me while he believed I could be of use to him. The whisky was one thing, but otherwise I had no objections to his decision. Mandušić had already proved to be remarkably patient. I hadn’t responded to calls from his office for weeks, and it had been months since I sent him a speech.

  However, my dismissal meant that I lost my access to police information, without which the chances of discovering my mother’s identity clearly became negligible. But I was not to be discouraged. I would have to think faster, differently and better.

  Ultimately I still had help. Wovenhand hadn’t forgotten me. His two emails – one in which he sent me details of the interrogation of David Richard Berkowitz, and the other a memo of Inspector Spahić about a conversation with one of the Višegrad killers – helped me fill in the gaps in the picture of my mother. But it wasn’t particularly clear, and certainly no brighter. It felt like a bottomless pit gaping in front of me, and it was too threatening and too far beyond anything I had ever dared to imagine, even in my darkest fantasies, for me to look into it without fearing the worst. And that’s why I knew I would continue to stare at that horrible mass that trickled from what was my mother; darker than the universe, heavier than lead and stickier than tar. And I continued to handle it, squeeze it and bombard it with questions. I would stare at it for as long and as persistently as I had to until I saw the bottom. That could destroy me, of course, and that made it all the more attractive. What other, pressing work did I have anyway? My investigation had brought passion to my life – be it for knowledge, truth, or something much more trivial – and I had become addicted.

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  David Richard Berkowitz was a serial killer who performed under the artistic name ‘The Son of Sam’. I was familiar with his murderous opus but had never been particularly interested: I didn’t care for the New York of the seventies, where he committed his murders, nor the way in which he killed. After studying truly inventive serial killers, why would I take an interest in one who shot his victims with a revolver? Still, I ended up writing an article or two about his life and work.

  What made Berkowitz special is what I didn’t know about him and was revealed to me by Wovenhand’s email. In a letter from prison, he claimed: ‘There are more Sons out there – God help the world.’ His prison correspondence contains descriptions of occult crimes committed by the ‘Four-P Movement’, a cult based in California. He claimed to have been part of its New York affiliate.

  The two sons of his neighbour Sam Carr were also allegedly members of the cult, whose rituals involved shooting at innocent strangers and torturing dogs by flaying them alive.

  The cult was based in New York’s Untermyer Park. Bodies of skinned dogs were indeed discovered there on several occasions. Michael Newton’s Encyclopedia of Serial Killers, which Wovenhand cited from abundantly in his emails, states:

  Reporter Maury Terry, after six years on the case, believes there were at least five different gunners in the “Son of Sam” attacks, including Berkowitz, John Carr, and several suspects—one a woman—who have yet to be indicted. Terry also notes that six of the seven shootings fell in close proximity to recognized satanic holidays, the March 8th Voskerichian attack emerging as the sole exception to the pattern. In the journalist’s opinion, Berkowitz was chosen as a sca
pegoat by the other members of his cult, who then set out to “decorate” his flat with weird graffiti, whipping up a bogus “arson ledger”—which includes peculiar out-of-date entries—to support a plea of innocent by reason of insanity.

  In October 1979, Berkowitz wrote:

  I really don’t know how to begin this letter, but at one time I was a member of an occult group. Being sworn to secrecy or face death I cannot reveal the name of the group, nor do I wish to. This group followed a mixture of satanic practices, including the teachings of Aleister Crowley and Eliphas Levi. It was (and still is) totally blood-orientated and I am certain you know just what I mean. The Coven’s doctrines are a blend of ancient Druidism, teachings of the secret order of the Golden Dawn, Black Magic, and a host of other unlawful and obnoxious practices.

  As I said, I have no interest in revealing the Coven, especially because I have almost met sudden death on several occasions (once by half an inch) and several others have already perished under mysterious circumstances. These people will stop at nothing, including murder. They have no fear of man-made laws or the Ten Commandments.

  Spahić’s witness told a story similar to Berkowitz’s confession. Spahić found him in Višegrad, where he was a highly esteemed member of the community, a kind of hero (the inspector writes that people passing him in the street greeted him with respect). He lived modestly and worked as a builder’s labourer. He didn’t mind talking about his crimes. After three mugs of beer at a local pub, he confided in Spahić that he knew he would never be put on trial.

  “So you don’t deny that the murders you committed were connected to certain rites?”

  “No, but I can’t talk about that. I really can’t.”

  “Can you at least give me a hint of what you believe in?”

  “Listen, old man, thanks for the beer, but you’re sounding like an idiot. ‘No’ means ‘no’, OK?”

  “Alright. But is it some kind of Church?”

  “Uh-huh. It’s a Church, just like an inverted cross is still a cross. But I warn you: You’re treading dangerously. Do you realize what power you’re up against?”

  “Can you at least tell me the name of your group?”

  “At least? You’ll never find that out.”

  “Are there many of you?”

  “Enough.”

  “And where?”

  “Wherever history is made. Wherever there is power.”

  I knew what I had to do now. I sat down at the computer, and soon a new series of deaths opened up in front of me.

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  In each of the cities where I established that a member of Yugoslav émigré circles died under peculiar circumstances, an as-yet-unsolved occult murder also occurred.

  A teenage boy died on Kaptol Hill in Zagreb. Street sweepers found him leaning up against the wall of the cathedral, his veins slashed. Judgement was passed: He had been listening to ‘heavy metal’, whose dark messages had driven him to suicide. Instead of searching for the killer, the police spent their efforts writing a communiqué about the harmfulness of the ‘obscure music our young people are exposed to’.

  In Brussels, in a lane behind Le Plaza Hotel, a bag of human organs and scraps of wax was found beside a rubbish skip.

  In London, the bodies of a young man and a young woman were found on a houseboat moored in the canal near Camden Market. The investigation was quick to establish a heroin overdose. But what then was the explanation for the small, hidden shrine discovered on the boat, and the decapitated crows sacrificed to whatever power they (the killers or the killed?) believed in?

  In Ohrid, Macedonia, the waters of the lake washed ashore the bloated, badly decomposed body of an old woman with eyes and tongue missing. Had fish eaten them because the body was in the water for so long?

  Another teenage death was reported, this time from Oslo; the young man had been obsessed with the devil and listened to ‘heavy metal’.

  In Dubrovnik, a girl committed suicide by hanging herself from a beam in her parents’ high-ceilinged drawing room. No one was worried that there was no chair at the spot where she died. How did she get up high enough? And did she shove the crucifix into her vagina herself, in a moment of derangement before death?!

  In Frankfurt, at the main cemetery, someone dug up the corpse of a child that had died of a rare tropical disease that made its body rot and its brain turn to mush. The disease left the doctors dumfounded, all the more so because, as far as they knew in their ignorance, there was no kind of insect in Frankfurt capable of transmitting such a disease. No one cared about the details; for example, the flayed dog skin that had been draped about the gravestone, a little angel spreading its wings above the child.

  At Munich airport, on a remote part of the runway, a pool of human blood and the mutilated bodies of three dogs were found.

  In some places, the ritual crime occurred just one week after the ‘natural’ death of the émigré, in others it was a whole year earlier or later. But the pattern was clear. I had marked the killings of émigrés on a map of Europe with blue dots, and now I designated the ritual crimes on it in red. Even when confused, our brain strives for some form of order, and then, after establishing order where there was none, we cause even more chaos... I thought that the map, and with it the portrait of my mother, would only be complete when I was able to link the locations of all the killings and end up with a perfect circle. I took a felt-tip and began joining the locations of the crimes. It was far from being a circle. I moved back a few steps and tried to imagine what shape I would get if I traced the lines further, towards the margins of the map. And then, in my mind, I saw a number nine stretching across all of Europe.

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  I stood perplexed in front of the number, but it didn’t mean anything to me. Still, it was a clear and unmistakable sign, and it was up to me to interpret it.

  I sat down at the computer and set about searching for information about the number nine and its role in occult rites.

  The first website I opened confronted me with a Protestant pastor: ‘The number nine is important to the followers of occult teachings mainly because of their perverse enjoyment in Jesus’ death, which was marked with the number nine,’ he thundered.

  The key to the interpretation he presented lay in the Gospel of Mark in the New Testament: “And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, ‘Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachtani?’ – ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ And some of the bystanders hearing it said, ‘Behold, he is calling Elijah.’ And one ran and, filling a sponge full of vinegar, put it on a reed and gave it to him to drink, saying, ‘Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come to take him down.’ And Jesus uttered a loud cry, and breathed his last.”

  Mark thus claims that Jesus died at the ninth hour. I asked myself when that was, by our reckoning. The answer was not easy to find. The more I looked into the issue, the less I knew – almost as little as the self-declared authorities on biblical matters. I read debates about whether Jesus was really crucified on a Friday, or if it was a Wednesday. And both sides, needless to say, were in possession of convincing arguments.

  That strengthened my conviction that history is fiction, as is every confession, not to mention people’s memoirs. It is just as dogmatic to interpret history from a history textbook as it is on the basis of conspiracy theories. Whether we read a printed page or search with a candle in the margins for what was written in lemon juice – we will ultimately make our own story anyway, becoming the narrator of what we believe in and hold to be the truth. Every one of our truths will be our own, and our own account. There is only one kind of storyteller; the unreliable. There is only one kind of authorship; the unreliable. Even God is unreliable as an author, so what do you expect of everyone else? In the end, poetry would seem to be the least fictional medium, since it was the very first to forsake any pretence of so-called objective truth. To learn about the First World War fro
m Trakl, the holocaust from Celan, capitalism from Pound and communism from Brecht is the only thing that makes sense.

  * * *

  What caused people to doubt St. Mark’s account? In Jesus’ time, the Jewish day began at nightfall and lasted until the following night. The Roman day began at dawn, at six o’clock in the morning, and lasted twelve hours, until six in the afternoon. How did Mark calculate time; as a Jew or a Roman? When I Googled the text of the New Testament, it was clear from St. Mark’s description that Jesus was crucified in the daylight.

  I remembered Maria’s email and opened it again. The ninth hour by the Church’s reckoning of time, which would soon be replaced by the mercantile way, began at what we today call two in the afternoon and lasted until three, she wrote.

  I could rely on Maria and Le Goff, and felt that we had resolved that question satisfactorily.

  So much for the Christians and their ninth hour! But more than that, I was interested in what the occultists thought about that hour. They evidently attached great significance to numbers and even had a special name for the discipline: Gematria. Also, as I was to learn, they considered nine to be a perfect number, one that always returns to itself. Nine, I read, “is a snake that bites its own belly – a snake consuming itself”. It is the number of the full circle. The sum of the numbers denoting a full circle, 360 degrees, 3+6+0, is nine. The sum of all the numbers up to nine, I read further, 1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8, is thirty-six. 3+6=9. When we add the number nine itself to that sum, we get 45. Even the mathematically challenged with no feel for systems of numbers can see where this is heading; naturally, 4+5 equals 9.