Red 1-2-3 (9780802192844)

by Katzenbach, John

  Across the room, the Big Bad Wolf was shuffling through the day’s mail, discarding just about everything into the plastic bin they used for recycling, grimacing at the occasional bill that appeared in the midst of flyers, catalogues, and letters marked “Important” which were only false come-ons for new credit cards or requests for donations to political parties or causes. Mrs. Big Bad Wolf noticed that her husband kept a few of these; she knew that he made small contributions to cancer and heart research. These were a few dollars here or there, donations that prompted him to joke, “I’m just trying to make sure we get into heaven.”

  She was unsure whether heaven was any longer a possibility for either of them.

  “So, shall we watch some television?” the Wolf asked as he finished with a flourish, tossing the last useless letter into the trash.

  The answer, Mrs. Big Bad Wolf knew, was routinely yes, followed by their taking their usual seats and flipping through the usual channels to find the usual shows. There was something wondrously reassuring, almost seductive, in the idea that she could simply say yes and shuffle back into the way things had been. With popcorn.

  She was torn. A large part of her insisted that she just keep her mouth shut and let everything slide inexorably back into the life that made her so happy. But a small portion of her acknowledged that nothing in the world was as crippling as uncertainty. She had been through that with disease, and now she wondered whether she could ever take her husband’s hand and hold it in her own again without frightening, lingering doubts.

  While this debate raged within her, making her almost dizzy with anxiety, she heard herself say, “We have to talk about something.”

  It was a little like someone else had entered the room and some other Mrs. Big Bad Wolf was speaking out loud, in an overdramatic, theatrically ominous tone of voice. She wanted to shout at this intruder, “You keep your mouth shut!” and “How dare you come between my husband and me?”

  The Big Bad Wolf turned slowly toward her.

  “Talk?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Is there something wrong? Are you feeling bad? Do I need to take you to the doctor?”

  “No. I’m fine.”

  “Well, that’s a relief. Is there some problem at work?”

  “No.”

  “Well, okay. Let’s talk. It’s something else, I guess. So what’s on your mind?” He didn’t sound anything other than mildly bemused. He gave a little shrug and gestured toward her as if inviting her to continue.

  Mrs. Big Bad Wolf wondered what her face looked like. Was she pale? Was it furrowed with fears? Did her lip tremble? Did her eye twitch? Why couldn’t he see the distress that she knew she was wearing like a loud and colorful suit of clothes?

  She felt unable to breathe. She wondered if she would fall to the floor choking. “I . . .” she stopped.

  “Yes. You what?” he responded. The Wolf still seemed oblivious to the hot-iron agony that encased his wife.

  “I read what you’re writing,” she said.

  The grin on her husband’s face faded quickly. “What?”

  “You left the keys to your office when we switched cars the other night. I went in and read some of the pages by your computer.”

  “My new book,” he said.

  She nodded.

  “You were not supposed to do that,” the Wolf said. The timbre of his voice had changed. The amused tone had been replaced by an even, flat sound, like a single dissonant note on an out-of-tune piano played over and over. She had expected him to cry out in outrage and anger. The equanimity in his voice frightened her. “My office, what I’m working on, that belongs to me. It’s private. I’m not ready to show it to anyone. Even you.”

  Mrs. Big Bad Wolf wanted to say, “Forgive me” or “I’m sorry. I won’t do it again.” She was suddenly confused. She was unsure who had done the worse thing: herself, for violating her husband’s space and work, or him—because he might be a killer.

  But she swallowed all her apologies like sour-tasting milk. “Are you going to kill them?” she asked. She could not believe she was asking that question. It was beyond blunt. If he replied yes what would that mean for her? If he said no how could she believe him?

  It never occurred to her that she might be putting herself at risk merely by asking.

  He smiled. “What do you think I’m going to do?” he said. The timbre in his voice had changed again. Now he spoke like someone going over a grocery list.

  “I think you intend to kill them. I don’t understand why.”

  “You might get that impression from what you read,” he replied.

  “There are three . . .” She’d started a question, but stopped, unsure what the question should be.

  “Yes. Three. It’s a unique situation,” he replied to something she had not asked.

  “Doctor Jayson and that girl at my school, Jordan—”

  “And one other,” he said, interrupting. “Her name is Sarah. You don’t know her. But she’s special. They are all very special.”

  This word special seemed to be wrong, she thought, but she could not say how or why. She shook her head. “I don’t understand,” she said. “I don’t understand at all.”

  “How much did you read?” he asked.

  Mrs. Big Bad Wolf hesitated. The conversation wasn’t going as she’d thought it would. She had confronted her husband and asked him if he was a killer, and this should have made everything clear, but instead they were talking about words.

  “Just a little,” she said. “Maybe a page or two.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Yes.” Mrs. Big Bad Wolf knew this was the truth, but it felt like a lie.

  “So you don’t really know what the book is about, do you? Or what I’m trying to achieve in what context. If I asked you about plot, or characters, or style, you couldn’t really answer, could you?”

  Mrs. Big Bad Wolf shook her head. She wanted to cry. “It’s about killing.”

  “All my books are about killing. That’s what mystery and thriller writers do. I thought you liked them.”

  This comment, maybe even intended as a criticism, struck home. “Of course I like them. You know that,” she said. It sounded like a plea coming out of her mouth. What she wanted to say was, “Those books are what brought us together. Those books saved my life.”

  “But you only read, what did you say, a couple of pages? And you think you know what’s in the book?”

  “No, no, of course not.”

  “You realize there are several hundred pages that you didn’t read in that manuscript?”

  “Yes.”

  “If you picked up a spy novel by, oh, say John le Carré, and read two or three random pages from somewhere in the middle, do you think you could tell me what the book was about?”

  “No.”

  “Do you even know whether my book is in the first or third person?”

  “It seemed like the first person. You were talking about murder—”

  He interrupted. “Me? Or my character?”

  She wanted to cry again. She wanted to sob and toss herself down on the floor because she didn’t know the answer. A part of her feared you and a part of her pleaded for your character. All she managed was, “I don’t know.” The words came out in a half-wail.

  “Don’t you trust me?” he asked.

  Tears finally started to well up in Mrs. Big Bad Wolf’s eyes. “Of course I do,” she said.

  “And don’t you love me?” he asked.

  This question pierced her. “Yes, yes,” she choked. “You know I do . . .”

  “Then I don’t see what the problem is,” he said.

  Mrs. Big Bad Wolf’s head spun. Nothing was happening the way she thought it should. “The pictures on the wall. The
schedules. Diagrams. And then the words I read . . .”

  He smiled, benignly. “When you put it all together it made you envision one thing . . .” She nodded. “. . . But the truth could be something totally different.”

  Her head bounced up and down in agreement.

  “So,” he continued, speaking softly, almost with the same simple tone and terms one would use with a child, “everything you saw made you worried, right?”

  “Yes.”

  He leaned back in his seat. “But I’m a writer,” he said, layering a grin across his face. “And sometimes to let loose creativity you have to invent something real. Something that seems like it is happening right in front of you. Something more real than real, I suppose. That’s a good way of putting it. That’s the process. Don’t you think that’s true?”

  Again she was afraid she would choke. “I guess so,” Mrs. Big Bad Wolf said slowly. She rubbed some of the tears out of the corners of her eyes. “I want to believe—” she started, but she stopped abruptly. She took another deep breath. She felt like she was underwater.

  “Think of the great writers—Hemingway, Faulkner, Dostoyevsky, Dickens—or the writers today we kind of like, John Grisham and Michael Connolly and Thomas Harris. You think they’re any different?”

  “No,” she said hesitantly.

  “I mean, how do you invent a Raskolnikov or a Hannibal Lecter if you don’t crawl into their skin completely? Think like them. Act like them. Let them become a part of you.”

  The Big Bad Wolf didn’t sound like he wanted an answer to his question. His wife felt tossed back and forth by uncertainty. What had seemed so obvious and terrifying after she violated her way into the office now seemed to be something different. When she read his work in progress, had she come to it already suspicious, or naïve and innocent?

  She suddenly remembered sitting in a stark, sterile doctor’s office listening to complicated treatment plans and therapeutic programs but only really hearing about the low odds of living. This entire conversation seemed to her to be the same. She was having difficulty hearing anything that didn’t reassure her, but everything just seemed to make things more complex. At the same time, however, Mrs. Big Bad Wolf grasped at threads of certainty. A single, terrified voice shrieked within her, and she finally gave in and asked the blunt question. “Have you killed anyone?”

  She wished she could turn this question into a demand, like a television prosecutor filled with righteous fury and insistence on the truth, but she felt herself melting. It was so easy to be harsh and firm over at the school with all the stupid requests from overprivileged and selfish teenagers. Being tough with them wasn’t a challenge. This was different.

  “Do you think I’ve killed someone?” he asked. Every time he turned her questions back on her, she weakened. It was a little like standing in front of a fun-house mirror, watching her body turn wide and fat, then elongated and thin, and knowing that wasn’t what she really looked like, only afraid that she would somehow be trapped by the distorted mirror image and that would become her—misshapen, freakish. Unsteadily, Mrs. Big Bad Wolf rose, walked across to where she had left her satchel, and pulled from it sheaves of paper. She grasped all the printouts and spreadsheets that she had compiled that day.

  Her hand shook as she held them, and she stared down and was suddenly confused. She had placed them in careful order when she left her office. They were organized and arranged by time and date and detail, as if proving some point all by themselves. But it seemed to Mrs. Big Bad Wolf that somehow now they were in complete disarray, a disjointed and tangled mess that added up into nothing.

  “What’s all that?” the Big Bad Wolf abruptly asked. Again edginess had slid into his voice.

  “Why did you keep newspaper clips of these crimes?” she inquired, trying to ask a sensible question, one that would help bring clarity.

  “Research,” he answered quickly, cutting his words off sharply. “Based novels on real life. Kept clips. To remind me of the techniques that worked.” He looked directly at her. “So, not only did you read my new book, but you looked at my private scrapbooks as well.”

  She felt like she was being cross-examined. She couldn’t bring herself to utter the word yes, so instead she just nodded.

  “What else?” he asked.

  She shook her head.

  He asked again. “What else?”

  “That’s all,” she said. The words scratched her throat as they emerged.

  “But that’s not all, is it?”

  Now tears truly began to scorch her cheeks. She wanted to give in to despair. “I tried to check,” she moaned. She didn’t need to say what she had tried to check.

  “Check? How?”

  “I called a detective connected to this case.”

  She handed him a clip from a newspaper. In low-rent-newspaper language, it described an unfathomable terror. Snatched from the earth and killed. This was a case that went beyond nightmare, and Mrs. Big Bad Wolf twitched slightly as her hand brushed against his. She thought she was trapped somewhere between the sterility of the news story and the utter terrible truth of the missing girl’s last minutes. Mrs. Big Bad Wolf looked at her husband as his eyes drifted over the newspaper story. She expected him to burst out in self-righteous rage, except she wasn’t sure why he would react that way. Or any way.

  The Wolf glanced at the pages and then shrugged. He handed them back to his wife. “What did he tell you?”

  “Not much. It’s a cold case. Filed away. He doesn’t expect any sort of a breakthrough.”

  “That’s what I would have expected. If you’d asked me, I could have told you that. You know, you probably spoke to the same detective I spoke with years ago, back when I was writing the book.”

  This had not occurred to Mrs. Big Bad Wolf.

  “You remember, in my book, the girl is a seventh grader. She’s blond and came from a broken home.” Now the Big Bad Wolf was speaking like a teacher in a class for particularly stupid children. “But see, in the picture here, the victim is older and dark-haired and came from a large family.”

  Mrs. Big Bad Wolf shuddered. Of course. You should have remembered that. It’s all different.

  The Big Bad Wolf folded his arms in front of him. “I thought we always trusted each other,” he said. “When you were sick, didn’t you trust me to help take care of you?”

  “Yes,” she mumbled.

  “Since the very day we met, haven’t we always had a special, I don’t know, something?”

  “Yes, yes, yes,” she said. It felt like she was begging.

  “We have always been partners, haven’t we? What’s the silly word the kids like to use today? Soul mates. That’s it. Two words, actually. Right from that first minute, you knew you were put on this earth for me, and I knew that I was here for you . . .”

  Softly spoken yeses poured from Mrs. Big Bad Wolf’s lips.

  The Big Bad Wolf smiled. “Then I don’t understand,” he said. “What are you so worried about?”

  “The others . . .” she started to say.

  “Which?”

  “Before we married. Before we met.”

  “Other women?”

  “No, no, no . . .”

  “Well, what others?” He was using a soft voice. Words seemed to float in the air between them, cloudlike.

  “The women in the news stories.”

  “You mean the real-life cases I used for my fictional books?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about them?”

  “Did you kill them? And then write about them?”

  The Big Bad Wolf hesitated. He pointed toward the living room couch, waving his hand for his wife to take her customary seat. She let the question reverberate in the house like a distant thunderclap diminishing amidst pounding rain. As she seat
ed herself uncomfortably, the Wolf plopped down in the armchair he usually occupied through the evening. He leaned back like he was relaxing, but he looked up at the ceiling as if seeking guidance from above. “Doesn’t it make more sense to read about them and then write about them?” he finally asked, dropping his eyes to fix on hers.

  Mrs. Big Bad Wolf was trying to organize her thoughts, measuring dates of deaths against publication dates, adding in the time it took to write, the lag time between completion and publication—all the mathematical factors involved. She could not understand why dates she thought were etched clearly into her memory now seemed faded and unreadable.

  “Do you really think I killed someone? Anyone? Do you think that’s me?”

  She was unsure. Part of her wanted to say yes. But another part did not. She found herself moving forward involuntarily, so that she was perched on the very edge of the couch, almost ready to slip to the floor. She felt ill, nauseous; her head reeled and she could feel unconnected pain throughout her entire body. Her heartbeat was pounding—she could feel it in her chest, pushing furiously against her breast—and her temples pounded with a sudden, vicious headache. She was thirsty, her throat was parched, and she suddenly thought, If he tells me the truth, would he have to kill me?

  Maybe that would be better.

  “Of course not,” she said.

  The Big Bad Wolf softened his gaze and looked at his wife in the same way that a child might look at a baby kitten. His mind was churning, part congratulatory, part racing ahead with new plans. In the first place, he felt the conversation had gone exactly the way he’d expected it to. He hadn’t known when his wife was going to stumble on his reality, but he had known it would happen, and many times, alone in his office, or perched in some vantage point watching one of the three Reds, he had played out what she would say and how he would respond. And he was pleased with the way he’d limited the lies. That was an important consideration, he believed. Always tell as much truth as you can, so that the lies are far less recognizable.

  But beyond his sense of satisfaction for having successfully prepared for that moment, he was accelerating his next steps. Write a chapter entitled Maintaining the Right Disguise, he said to himself. The key to any successful murder is creating the proper hiding place. It makes no sense to be a loner, to be isolated, driven and reeking of wrongdoing to the first cop that comes sniffing around. The best killers appear to the naked eye to be something much different. No one will ever say about him, “He seemed like he was up to no good.” No. About the Big Bad Wolf, they will say, “We had no idea he was so special. He seemed so ordinary. But he wasn’t, was he? We had no idea he was so great.” That’s what they will say about me.