Haftmann's Rules

by Robert White

  Gallatine’s voice was the higher, plaintive, urging, but the words would not come. Then the other, its nasal Boston accent all too familiar. It shouldn’t have surprised me that Cooney was here, but what I didn’t know was whether he was Lindell’s advance guard or sent at his command. Do a little strongarming act on Gallatine to keep him quiet. I moved closer until I was directly beneath the kitchen windows; someone had cracked them for ventilation.

  Cooney’s voice was now soothing, reassuring Gallatine. I heard my own name once or twice, and then Gallatine, the equal in size of the Boston cop, took his usual arrogant tone. Cooney spoke little thereafter. I heard tonight and settle this thing—and then silence.

  A door slammed, then a car door, and an engine caught. Gravel sounds. I bolted back for the cover of the woods and then made my way by the same route to my car hidden in the cattails. Tonight I would bring some equipment I had stored at my house. A little electronic eavesdropping gadgetry purchased from my earliest days in the private detective business; most of it testified to my gullibility in thinking I would need this stuff, but I had taped enough adulterous spouses to justify its expense. From my hiding spot, the directional mic, at least, would pick up conversations from the glass. Somewhere from the abyss of my darkest self, I felt the thrill of imminent combat.

  Oh yeah, Lindell himself was coming for a visit.

  I drove home and paced the house for an hour. I had Cooney’s gun in my fist the entire time, but I was acting out scenes in my head, dialogue, what I was going to say, what he would say. I drank a little to ease down. The sweat was pouring off me and my entire system was working overtime. I walked and drank. I thought of eating something, but I didn’t. I had broken all my Haftmann rules so often by now, I didn’t know who I was anymore. I had revenge for food. Nothing else would do. I lay on my couch for a little shut-eye at five and set the alarm for six thirty. The heat was stifling, so I downed a couple shots in quick order to help myself relax. I felt the exhaustion begin pressing me down into the couch, flattening me like bricks on top of my chest and then, mercifully, I slept.

  Saturated with booze as I was, oblivious to my own degeneration, I was given the most startling of psychic warnings in the dream sequence that began as soon as I fell into sleep. I was in a cave echoing with sound; someone was trilling an operatic air, then piano music: Claire De Lune. Dripping sounds accompanied by intermittent hissing. That weird little psychiatrist from Cleveland, Matrooshian, was in my dream, nodding and beckoning from a far corner of the cave; his spherical moon face glowing at me. He pointed me toward another room in the cave. I went in. Ah fuck. An autopsy room, two bloodied sheets covering two female forms. I knew without seeing their faces that it was Ingrid and Annaliese, mother and daughter on the slabs awaiting dissection. Old Doc Harris, nattily dressed in his bow tie, came in wearing olive green surgeon’s garb and went to work on them, flung the sheets aside and began cutting. I watched him make the Y-incisions on each bloodied torso. The mother’s sagging breasts blue with veins. The scalpel passed across the bloodied torsos of mother and daughter and then I heard the buzz of a saw and noticed that Harris had an assistant; he was masked and intent on his work as he cut the caps off the backs of their heads to remove the brains. I turned away and put my face in my hands and sobbed like a child. When I looked again, Harris was gone, the room was a blood-spattered chaos, their gutted bodies were hanging upside down from the ceilings, blue intestines trailing down to the floor.

  Fiendish laughter from the corner; then a naked, blood-smeared Lindell charges at me with a knife too large for any surgeon and hisses as he thrusts it into my stomach . . .

  I rolled off the couch. Awake, panting in terror. I actually patted myself. Just sweat, the booze was coming through my pores and had soaked through the couch. I was wet down to my underwear. I remembered the smell of the skin coming off the Jack-in-the-Box killer when he hoisted me aloft. A burning stench like leaves and old socks. Booth told me once that serial killers had an excess of cadmium or something that gave them a rank odor.

  I looked at the window for a long moment before I realized that it was dark, well past sundown. I grabbed the alarm clock from the floor: 8:17. I threw it against the wall and raced upstairs to the hall closet to retrieve the equipment I needed, threw it all into the backseat, and hit the gas pedal and careened down my driveway in third gear. I did eighty-, eighty-five miles an hour all the way down 531 and hit Route 307 in eleven minutes flat.

  Goddamn, my self-loathing was at an all-time high: a drunk, a failure, a derelict, a fool. Every species of subhuman I had bagged in years as a homicide officer came roaring in my ears.

  I had let them die because I wasn’t good enough, strong enough, sober enough . . . I choked back self-hatred and cursed, my good eye wet with tears: tunnel vision, I told myself, concentrate, do it right.

  I slowed down but almost drove past my hiding spot, missing the cattails, and bucking the car onto softer ground that sucked the front end right up to the fenders. I grabbed the equipment and realized it with an icy shock:

  No gun, I left the fucking gun underneath the seat with Henry Lee, my wrench.

  I clambered and stumbled, careless of the route and took chances on being spotted from the front of the house. Stupid, stupid, I thought. I was dripping wet, wheezing, and my khakis were nearly shredded from the brambles I had stumbled through. I moved up to the edge of the trees as close to the open as I dared and set up the mike. The house was dark, completely blackened. No windows or night lights. No sound evident from any room as I beamed the mike at all windows in rotation. The house was outlined clearly beneath the moonlit sky.

  Then a light.

  I saw Gallatine, bound and gagged in his own living room, sitting on a chair. Gray duct tape was wrapped across his mouth and he was pointed right at me. All the curtains were drawn back. No other furniture in the room. Just Gallatine, naked and tied to a chair, looking right at me.

  Lindell. His doing. They know . . .

  At this, the moment of my worst epiphany, I felt the gun barrel jammed hard into the nape of my neck. Cooney spoke, “Get up slowly. Don’t move or I’ll drill you.”

  I did what he said.

  He cuffed me, patted me down. “Where are my guns, asshole?”

  I told him I wasn’t carrying. He grunted something and then pointed me toward the house. We went in the back, Cooney flipping lights in each room while I stood in the dark. Gallatine’s eyes looked at me in pure animal terror. I knew the blow was coming before I felt it because I saw it happening in Gallatine’s eyes as they drifted from

  my face to a point over my shoulder.

  Payback time . . .

  When I snapped to, I was tied down with ropes in a dining room chair; ropes were crossed in front of me and cinched around my thighs and then pulled taut and tied off somewhere beyond my vision. I couldn’t move anything except my fingers and my head from side to side.

  Cooney tore off a strip of duct tape for my mouth. I heard a voice behind him say, “No, Sean. Leave it.”

  Lindell, of course. How much more fucked could I be?

  Cooney argued a moment and then Lindell said in that mesmerizing voice, “There’s no one for Mister Haftmann to alert. We’re in the country. Let him scream. I rather hope so.”

  I turned my head but I still couldn’t see him. I saw the rest of the room’s furniture piled haphazardly in the next room, toppled chairs and table, settee; china dishes lay scattered on the floor. I looked at Gallatine again, but his widened eyes were holding the same expression.

  The scalpel creased my skin a couple times on the back and shoulders but the remnants of my shirt came away in a gentle tug. The ropes held the fragment of the rest of my shirt to my skin. Cooney pulled off my shoes and then my pants were sliced away the same as my shirt except for what was held in place by the ropes. He pulled at my clothing after each movement of the scalpel. I felt warm blood trickling down to my ankle. Cooney threw my shredded clothing into the ro
om with the furniture.

  “Comfy?” asked Lindell. Cooney laughed.

  Then the voice began, a drone, that moved closer to my ears and then he stood in front of me. If it were a color it would be flat grey: “You are hopeless, Haftmann. Detective Cooney tells me your little campsite in the woods out back would have been spotted by a trainee fresh out of school. Fortunately, he has some experience in detection, like you. What took you so long?”

  I knew that speaking or not speaking was all the same. It was a game too sophisticated for me, and I remembered how I had leaped for him when I couldn’t take it any longer. This was not a Boston prison. I was not going to be escorted back to a cell. I clenched my jaws to keep my teeth from chattering.

  Gallatine began making muffled noises behind his gag. Lindell glanced at him, then to Cooney. “Not too hard. Just stun him a little.” Cooney stepped over to him and hit him across the temple with the edge of his hand. Lindell said, “Manners, Larry. We don’t interrupt our betters when they’re speaking.”

  He returned to his position in front of me. His hands behind his back, rocking slightly on the balls of his feet. Cooney had moved off to the doorway and crossed his arms across his chest as he leaned against the wall. The gun, a cobalt blue .45 dangled from his hand.

  “You see, I’m not disappointed to have to be here. Things should be tidy and you were becoming an annoyance.”

  He removed a wadded up piece of paper and read it to me: ‘Breach for breach, eye for eye, tooth for tooth.’ Leviticus, Chapter 24, verse 19. I know Leviticus also. Perhaps you’re familiar with these. Same chapter, verses one and seventeen. ‘And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, And he that killeth any man shall surely be put to death. And if any man cause a blemish in his neighbor; as he hath done, so shall it be done to him.’

  Then his face butted mine, his nose touching my own. “You’re a killer, aren’t you, Mister Haftmann? Don’t you deserve justice too? I know all about you. I know you better than you know yourself. You’re a sad, wretched failure of a man. Yours is a wasted life. I’ve spent thousands gathering all the facts of your life. None of it adds up to a life worthy of respect. But I believe one should not underestimate an enemy. One should know one’s adversaries strengths as well as weaknesses.”

  I thought of sharks who roll their eyes back in their heads behind a thick layer of cartilage to keep the prey clamped in their jaws from getting to their eyes. If he brought his face near mine again, I would try to catch his flesh in my teeth, pull him downwards, bite my way to his eyes . . .

  “Haftmann, don’t you realize that I have gone beyond your puny ability to fathom? I am going to be someone who will be remembered centuries from now for what will happen in this country soon. Did I tell you, Haftmann, I was once a Marxist? The Hegelian dialectic, the inevitability of the proletariat’s overthrow. I bought it all, as they say, lock, stock, and barrel. I was a young man then, eager for belief in a system. Of course, like any intellectual worth his salt, I was contemptuous of Christianity. As Marx said, the opiate of the masses. Panes et circenses. Bread and circuses”

  He laughed and began pacing in front of me. “It delights me even now to think of it.

  “Haftmann, those girls, all this bother about fourteen worthless lives? Don’t you understand there is no significance to them? They were my little piglets. I had to resist the little touches of artistry I am so capable of. No embellishments such as will occur tonight, I assure you. With the detective’s able assistance, I kept them varied in style. They were chosen, you might say, like you. Like Lawrence here.”

  He walked over to Gallatine and stroked his head.

  “I took care of his little wench as a personal favor. The Visigoths are at the gate, Haftmann. Thousands streaming across the borders, boatloads of human filth washing ashore . . . a fifth column of the black race so entrenched in crime, poverty, and welfare that the system is cracking at the seams. Sad but true. The United States of America is dying. Another is being reborn in these momentous times, slouching toward Bethlehem, inevitable, cruel, cleansing, glorious to behold.” He clapped his hands and rubbed them as he looked from Gallatine to me.

  “You two are at the epicenter of the revolution.”

  He embraced Gallatine’s shoulders and leaned his mouth in to kiss the imprint of Gallatine’s lips.

  “You used me for revenge. You betrayed my affection and for what? Did she jig, and amble and lisp like a woman? What our friend Haftmann might call cooze, a little half-breed pussy. It’s really your fault, Larry. Haftmann here is merely an üntermensch, but you call yourself an intellectual.” He unconsciously traced the white line of scar I had put there.

  He patted Gallatine under the jaw and said gently: “It’s all right. Be strong.”

  Gallatine was hyperventilating and the tape covering his mouth puffed out like a frog in courtship.

  He stepped in front of me. “Since you like to quote so much, Haftmann, listen to this: ‘Anyone who wants to cure this era, which is inwardly sick and rotten, must first summon up the courage to make clear the causes of this disease.’ Mein Kampf. Like Hitler, I too am going to give the order to burn down to the raw flesh the ulcers of this poisoning of the wells.”

  Cooney came up behind me and threw a cloth around my eyes. The last thing I saw was the tape puffing in and out over Gallatine’s mouth and his eyes moistening with fear and terror.

  Noises, footsteps, the scraping of a chair.

  Lindell spoke to me as he moved about the room: “Did you know I once worked in Mexico on a federal grant? A DEA thing, actually. Mexico and drugs. Mix two thousand years of Aztec cruelty and the Conquistadors and the result should not surprise one. But I had most interesting discussions—there, that should do it—with a profound and silly priest. The man was inspired by the late Father Camillo Torrés of La Revoluciòn. I myself prefer Subcomandante Marcos, a believer in technology and the machine gun. But I did him no harm in the capacity in which I myself was traveling. As I said, we had strong discussions where I sought to persuade that radical Catholic that his own Christianity should disallow his embrace of violence as solution. You see, Haftmann, I had not yet come round to his point of view.”

  I felt myself tipped backwards in the chair and then dragged in a semicircle. The wrapping around my head was removed and I was sitting directly across from Gallatine, separated by about a yard of space. There was black tubing snaked out of his mouth; it was wrapped with the same gray duct tape to a green garden hose that twisted behind his chair and trailed out of the room toward the kitchen.

  “Ecce homo, Haftmann. Behold the man. I want you to watch.”

  As he spoke Cooney began looping a cord several times around my forehead so that I couldn’t move my neck.

  Lindell put his face close to mine but I was unable to budge a muscle from the position.

  “This man,” he said, jabbing a finger in the direction of Gallatine, “has earned the enmity of the Priesthood because he betrayed me. He is going to pay for his little obsession with your wench, and you will witness his punishment. I wouldn’t have had to come to this backwater, but when I read in your little hick papers that a certain item was missing from a certain crime scene, I knew what was afoot.

  “I was invited to the hacienda of a drug lord in Chihuahua. Unbelievable poverty side by side with ostentatious wealth. The village square had pregnant girls who could not have been more than ten years old scrabbling in the dirt beside a doorway. Eating undigested kernels of corn right out of cattle feces. Unbelievable unless you see it with your own eyes. Squalor and hunger and filth as bad as Africa. You might say I had my own conversion right there in that village square. Something had to be done.”

  He continued speaking as he paced the room, and this time he spoke softly into the face of Gallatine. “It was right at our doorstep, Larry. How many more generations do you think it would take before we are Mexico? The icons of our age are all Hollywood fools or criminal financiers.”

  Gallati
ne’s eyes were as big and round as cue balls. “This man Haftmann is just a sad clown, a thug—but you, Larry. You betrayed me. Hitler dragged his friend Otto from the bed of his boy-lover and shot him.”

  Gallatine tried to make eye contact with him; he gargled behind the tape.

  “What is it, Lawrence?”

  Lindell, emerging from his own rhetoric like a man awakening from a pleasant dream, turned to me. “Save your breath, Haftmann. I pay the detective more in a week than he can make cleaning the scum from the Boston streets in a year.”

  He rubbed his hands and spoke to Cooney: “Almost ready? Good.”

  To me, he said, “The man who provided me with such a memorable experience was guilty of some picayune transgression against the drug lord. These bloated slugs have a medieval concept of themselves as complex as a baronial fiefdom. It pays to humor them, so the agents who brought me to his ranch didn’t interfere with the padrone’s primitive justice. It wouldn’t have done any good. Mordida would only have insulted him. We were in no small danger ourselves because this was a risky kind of field investigation. The little campesino was doomed for some transgression, I forget what. They brought his wife and daughter to the shed. They were raped and killed in front of him. Then they took him to another shed Garcia had built for carrying out extreme sentences like this.”

  Fear throbbed in my throat.

  He ignored me, continued to move about beyond the range of my peripheral vision. “They tied him to a chair and inserted a hose exactly as you see—down the throat. I have added a refinement or two. I greased the tubing for Gallatine. The urethra is tied off. The water turned on, and voilà, a human water balloon materializes before your eyes. ”