James Patterson

by Swimsuit (lit)

  Henri leaned back in his canvas chair, folded his hands over his tight gut, and began at the beginning.

  “I grew up in the sticks, a little farming town on the edge of nothing. My parents had a chicken farm, and I was their only child. They had a crappy marriage. My father drank. He beat my mother. He beat me. She beat me, and she also took some shots at him.”

  Henri described the creaking four-room farmhouse, his room in the attic over his parents’ bedroom.

  “There was a crack between two floorboards,” he told me. “I couldn’t actually see their bed, but I could see shadows, and I could hear what they were doing. Sex and violence. Every night. I slept over that.”

  Henri described the three long chicken houses — and how at the age of six, his father put him in charge of killing chickens the old-fashioned way, decapitation with an axe on a wooden block.

  “I did my chores like a good boy. I went to school. I went to church. I did what I was told and tried to duck the blows. My father not only clocked me regularly, but he also humiliated me.

  “My mom. I forgive her. But for years I had a recurring dream about killing them both. In the dream, I pinned their heads to that old stump in the chicken yard, swung the axe, and watched their headless bodies run.

  “For a while after I woke up from that dream, I’d think it was true. That I’d really done it.”

  Henri turned to me.

  “Life went on. Can you picture me, Ben? Cute little kid with an axe in my hand, my overalls soaked with blood?”

  “I can see you. It’s a sad story, Henri. But it sounds like a good place to start the book.”

  Henri shook his head. “I’ve got a better place.”

  “Okay. Shoot.”

  Henri hunched over his knees and clasped his hands. He said, “I would start the movie of my life at the summer fair. The scene would center on me and a beautiful blond girl named Lorna.”

  Chapter 81

  I CONSTANTLY CHECKED the recorder, saw that the wheels were slowly turning.

  A dry breeze blew across the sands, and a lizard ran across my shoe. Henri raked both hands through his hair, and he seemed nervous, agitated. I hadn’t seen this kind of fidgety behavior in him before. It made me nervous, too.

  “Please set the scene, Henri. This was a county fair?”

  “You could call it that. Agriculture and animals were on one side of the main path. Carnival rides and food were on the other. No breadcrumbs, Ben. This could have happened outside Wengen or Chipping Camden or Cowpat, Arkansas.

  “Don’t worry about where it was. Just see the bright lights on the fairgrounds, the happy people, and the serious animal competitions. Business deals were at stake here, people’s farms and their futures.

  “I was fourteen,” he continued. “My parents were showing exotic chickens in the fowl tent. It was getting late, and my father told me to get the truck from the private lot for exhibitor’s vehicles, upfield from the fairgrounds.

  “On the way, I cut through one of the food pavilions and I saw Lorna selling baked goods,” he said.

  “Lorna was my age and was in my class at school. She was blond, a little shy. She carried her books in front of her chest, so you couldn’t see her breasts. But you could see them anyway. There was nothing about Lorna I didn’t want.”

  I nodded, and Henri went on with his story.

  “That day I remember she was wearing a lot of blue. Made her hair look even more blond, and when I said hi to her, she seemed glad to see me. Asked me if I wanted to get something to eat at the fairgrounds.

  “I knew my father would kill me when I didn’t come back with the truck, but I was willing to take the beating, that’s how crazy I was about that beautiful girl.”

  Henri described buying Lorna a cookie and said that they’d gone on a ride together, that she’d grabbed his hand when the roller coaster made its swooping descent.

  “All the while I felt a wild kind of tenderness toward this girl. After the ride,” Henri said, “another boy came over, Craig somebody. He was a couple of years older. He looked right past me and told Lorna that he had tickets to the Ferris wheel, that it was unreal how the fairgrounds looked with the stars coming out and everything lit up down below.

  “Lorna said, ‘Oh, I’d love to do that,’ and she turned to me, and said, ‘You don’t mind, do you?’ and she took off with this guy.

  “Well, I did mind, Ben.

  “I watched them go, and then I went to get the truck and my beating. It was dark up in that lot, but I found my dad’s truck next to a livestock trailer.

  “Standing outside the trailer was another girl I knew from school, Molly, and she had a couple of calves with show ribbons on their halters. She was trying to load them into the trailer, but they wouldn’t go.

  “I offered to help her,” Henri told me. “Molly said, ‘No, thanks. I’ve got it,’ something like that, and tried to shove those calves up the ramp by herself.

  “I didn’t like the way she said that, Ben. I felt she had crossed a line.

  “I grabbed a shovel that was leaning against the trailer, and as Molly turned her back to me, I swung the shovel against the back of her head. There was the one loud smack, a sound that thrilled me, and she went down.”

  Henri stopped speaking. A long moment dragged on, but I waited him out.

  Then he said, “I dragged her into the trailer, shut the tailgate. By now she’d started to wail. I told her no one would hear her, but she wouldn’t stop.

  “My hands went around her neck, and I choked her as naturally as if I was reenacting something I’d done before. Maybe I had, in my dreams.”

  Henri twisted his watchband and looked away into the desert. When he turned back, his eyes were flat.

  “As I was choking her, I heard two men walking by, talking. Laughing. I was squeezing her neck so hard that my hands hurt, so I adjusted my grip and choked her again until Molly stopped breathing.

  “I let go of her throat, and she took another breath, but she wasn’t wailing anymore. I slapped her — and I got hard. I stripped off her clothes, turned her over, and did her, my hands around her throat the whole time, and when I was done, I strangled her for good.”

  “What went through your mind as you were doing this?”

  “I just wanted it to keep going. I didn’t want the feeling to stop. Imagine what it was like, Ben, to climax with the power of life and death in your hands. I felt I had earned the right to do this. Do you want to know how I felt? I felt like God.”

  Chapter 82

  I WAS AWOKEN the next morning when the trailer door rolled open, and light, almost white sunlight, poured in. Henri was saying, “I’ve got coffee and rolls, for you, bud. Eggs, too. Breakfast for my partner.”

  I sat up on the foldaway bed, and Henri lit the stove, beat the eggs in a bowl, made the frying pan sizzle. After I’d eaten, we began work under the awning. I kept turning it over in my mind: Henri had confessed to a murder. Somewhere, a fourteen-year-old girl had been strangled at a county fair. A record of her death would still exist.

  Would Henri really let me live knowing about that girl?

  Henri went back to the story of Molly, picked up where he’d left off the night before.

  He was animated, using his hands to show me how he’d dragged Molly’s body into the woods, buried it under piles of leaves, said that he was imagining the fear that would spread from the fairgrounds to the surrounding towns when Molly was reported missing.

  Henri said that he’d joined the search for Molly, put up posters, went to the candlelight vigil, all the while cherishing his secret, that he’d killed Molly and had gotten away with it.

  He described the girl’s funeral, the white coffin under the blanket of flowers, how he’d watched the people crying, but especially Molly’s family, her mother and father, the siblings.

  “I wondered what it must be like to have those feelings,” he told me.

  “You know about the most famous of the serial killers,
don’t you, Ben? Gacy, BTK, Dahmer, Bundy. They were all run by their sexual compulsions. I was thinking last night that it’s important for the book to make a distinction between those killers and me.”

  “Wait a minute, Henri. You told me how you felt raping and killing Molly. That video of you and Kim McDaniels? Are you telling me now you that you’re not like those other guys? How does that follow?”

  “You’re missing the point. Pay attention, Ben. This is critical. I’ve killed dozens of people and had sex with most of them. But except for Molly, when I’ve killed I’ve done it for money.”

  It was good that my recorder was taking it all down because my mind was split into three parts: The writer, figuring out how to join Henri’s anecdotes into a compelling narrative. The cop, looking for clues to Henri’s identity from what he told me, what he left out, and from the psychological blind spots he didn’t know that he had. And the part of my brain that was working the hardest, the survivor.

  Henri said that he killed for money, but he’d killed Molly out of anger. He’d warned me that he would kill me if I didn’t do what he said. He could break his own rules at any time.

  I listened. I tried to learn Henri Benoit in all of his dimensions. But mostly, I was figuring out what I had to do to survive.

  Chapter 83

  HENRI CAME BACK to the trailer with sandwiches and a bottle of wine. After he uncorked the bottle, I asked him, “How does your arrangement with the Peepers work?”

  “They call themselves the Alliance,” Henri said. He poured out two glasses, handed one to me.

  “I called them ‘the Peepers’ once and was given a lesson: no work, no pay.” He put on a mock German accent. “You are a bad boy, Henri. Don’t trifle with us.”

  “So the Alliance is German.”

  “One of the members is German. Horst Werner. That name is probably an alias. I never checked. Another of the Peepers, Jan Van der Heuvel, is Dutch.

  “Listen, that could be an alias, too. It goes without saying, you’ll change all the names for the book, right, Ben? But these people are not so stupid as to leave their own breadcrumbs.”

  “Of course. I understand.”

  He nodded, then went on. His agitation was gone, but his voice was harder now. I couldn’t find a crack in it.

  “There are several others in the Alliance. I don’t know who they are. They live in cyberspace. Well, one I know very well. Gina Prazzi. She recruited me.”

  “That sounds interesting. You were recruited? Tell me about Gina.”

  Henri sipped at his wine, then began to tell me about meeting a beautiful woman after his four years in the Iraqi prison.

  “I was having lunch in a sidewalk bistro in Paris when I noticed this tall, slender, extraordinary woman at a nearby table.

  “She had very white skin, and her sunglasses were pushed up into her thick brown hair. She had high breasts and long legs and three diamond watches on one wrist. She looked rich and refined and impossibly inaccessible, and I wanted her.

  “She put money down for the check and stood up to leave. I wanted to talk to her, and all I could think to say was, ‘Do you have the time?’

  “She gave me a long, slow look, from my eyes down to my shoes and back up again. My clothes were cheap. I had been out of prison for only a few weeks. The cuts and bruises had healed, but I was still gaunt. The torture, the things I’d seen, the afterimages, were still in my eyes. But she recognized something in me.

  “This woman, this angel whose name I did not yet know, said, ‘I have Paris time, New York time, Shanghai time… and I also have time for you.’ ”

  Henri’s voice was softened now as he talked about Gina Prazzi. It was as if he’d finally tasted fulfillment after a lifetime of deprivation.

  He said that they’d spent a week in Paris. Henri still visited every September. He described walking with her through the Place Vendôme, shopping with her there. He said that Gina paid for everything, bought him expensive gifts and clothing.

  “She came from very old money,” Henri told me. “She had connections to a world of wealth I knew nothing about.”

  After their week in Paris, Henri told me, they cruised the Mediterranean on Gina’s yacht. He called up images of the Côte d’Azur, one of the most beautiful spots in the world, he said.

  He recalled the lovemaking in her cabin, the swell of the waves, the wine, the exquisite meals in restaurants with high views of the Mediterranean.

  “I had nineteen fifty-eight Glen Garioch whisky at twenty-six hundred dollars a bottle. And here’s a meal I’ll never forget: sea urchin ravioli, followed by rabbit with fennel, mascarpone, and lemon. Nice fare for a country boy and ex–Al Qaeda POW.”

  “I’m a steak and potatoes man myself.”

  Henri laughed, said, “You just haven’t had a real gastronomic tour of the Med. I could teach you. I could take you to a pastry shop in Paris, Au Chocolat. You would never be the same, Ben.

  “But I was talking about Gina, a woman with refined appetites. One day a new guy appeared at our table. The Dutchman — Jan Van der Heuvel.”

  Henri’s face tightened as he talked about Van der Heuvel, how he had joined them in their hotel room, called out stage directions from his chair in the corner as Henri made love to Gina.

  “I didn’t like this guy or this routine, but a couple of months before I’d been sleeping in my own shit, eating bugs. So what wouldn’t I do to be with Gina, Jan Van der Heuvel or not?”

  Henri’s voice was drowned out by the roar of a helicopter flying over the valley. He warned me with his eyes not to move from my chair.

  Even after the silence of the desert returned, it was several moments before he continued his story about Gina.

  Chapter 84

  “I DIDN’T LOVE GINA,” Henri said to me, “but I was fascinated by her, obsessed with her. Okay. Maybe I did love her in some way,” Henri said, admitting to having a human vulnerability for the first time.

  “One day in Rome, Gina picked up a young girl —”

  “And the Dutchman? He was out of the picture?”

  “Not entirely. He’d gone back to Amsterdam, but he and Gina had some strange connection. They were always on the phone. She’d be whispering and laughing when she spoke with him. You can imagine, right? The guy liked to watch. But in the flesh, she was with me.”

  “You were with Gina in Rome.” I prompted him to continue with the main narrative.

  “Yes, of course. Gina picked up a student who was screwing her way through college, as they say. A first-semester prostitute from Prague, at UniversitU degli Studi di Roma. I don’t remember her name, only that she was hot and too trusting.

  “We were in bed, the three of us, and Gina told me to close my hands around the girl’s neck. It’s a sex game called ‘breath play.’ It enhances the orgasm, and yes, Ben, before you ask, it was exciting to revisit my singular experience with Molly. This girl passed out, and I loosened my grip so that she could breathe.

  “Gina reached out, took my cock in her hand, and kissed me. And then she said, ‘Finish her, Henri.’

  “I started to mount the girl, but Gina said, ‘No, Henri, you don’t understand. Finish her.’

  “She reached over to the bedside table, held up the keys to her Ferrari, swung the keys in front of my eyes. It was an offer, the car for the girl’s life.

  “I killed that girl. And I made love to Gina with the dead girl beside us. Gina was electrified and wild under my hands. When she came, it was like a death and a rebirth as a softer, sweeter woman.”

  Henri’s body language relaxed. He told me about driving the Ferrari, a leisurely three-day ride to Florence with many stops along the way, and about a life he believed was becoming his.

  “Not long after that trip to Florence, Gina told me about the Alliance, including the fact that Jan was an important member.”

  The travelogue of Western Europe had ended. Henri’s posture straightened, and the tempo of his voice changed from languid to clippe
d.

  “Gina told me that the Alliance was a secret organization composed of the very best people, by which she meant wealthy, filthy rich. She said that they could use me, ‘make use of my talents’ is the way she put it. And she said that I would be rewarded handsomely.

  “So Gina didn’t love me. She had a purpose for me. Of course, I was a little hurt by that. At first, I thought I might kill her. But there was no need for that, was there, Ben? In fact it would have been stupid.”

  “Because they hired you to kill for them?”