by Fante, Dan
Swan knew that there had to be a reason he wielded so much power. For even as his star rose to new heights above the Santa Monica coastline, so did his personal zeal for his principal hobby: torture and murder. He had killed often as part of his unfolding mission and those uninterrupted events were profound evidence to him of his unique existence. To date, ninety-seven humans had met their end at his hands. He had preserved mementos of each occasion in a special underground room at his estate and reexamined these artifacts whenever he felt a bit out of sorts.
Over the last twenty or so years he had moved on from the more simplistic bone breaking to more advanced excisions and other, more complex surgical procedures. For instance, removing the intestines of one of his subjects while that person watched from a mirror mounted above their body, all without anesthetic, had become one of Swan’s favorite diversions. The expression on his subject’s face as he or she watched a nearly soccer-ball sized mound of their own steaming entrails unraveling on their sternum was, to say the least, entertaining to observe.
Swan was aware that his bent for the exotic had become more extreme as time passed. These days he often enjoyed feeding his clients their removed body parts, severed and with an array of condiments.
He could think of no other person of historical significance who had killed more people with his own hands simply for the purpose of amusement. The pleasure—the satisfaction from these acts—had continued to grow to ever-increasing heights. Re-watching an expression of terror in the eyes of his victims in his film archives gave him a full measure of pleasure. It fed his appetite—his need—for more. Seemingly, the more fear he harnessed, the greater his sense of power, and the more pleasurable his later sexual emissions became.
In Hollywood men trembled when he entered a room. The women he owned sought him out to provide certain kinds of pleasure in exchange for his favor and influence. Swan knew that men like himself had inhabited the planet as archetypes for millennia. What his personal quest, in the time accorded to him here, was to create a new record of human possibility for others like himself. Nothing less. And time had proven him unerringly correct. Karl Swan hadn’t been stopped and he wouldn’t be stopped.
Current scientific data informed Swan that light in the universe could be traced back in an unbroken stream 13.6 billion years. His own life had been designated as a punctuation mark in human history. The world was ready for something else—something with teeth. Something entirely unique. Something to make mankind first tremble, then gawk in awe.
On many occasions over the years, in leaning over his victim—intentionally inhaling their last breath just after delivering a fatal thrust of his blade—he had sensed that he had become part of the eternal. He had risen to experience unification with ultimate power. True transcendence.
Birth and death were the only constants, and to be present at the moment—in the moment—when another person surrendered his being was, Swan felt, a vocation of the highest calling. The weak deserved pain and death. Their fear was their purpose on the planet. Swan’s task was to honor their uselessness by an act that emancipated them.
While the families of most men his age were interviewing board and care facilities for their aging and crippled loved ones, Swan’s physical abilities had remained largely undiminished. He could still run two miles, full-out, three times a week, on the quarter-mile track at the rear of his estate. Thanks primarily to human growth hormone, over the last fifteen years he had remained a superb physical specimen. His blood pressure was a steady one-twenty-six over seventy-two and his weight a trim and ready one hundred ninety-seven pounds—certainly adequate for his seventy-five-inch frame.
His only physical deficit was his lifelong inability to sleep. The dreams that haunted him almost every time he closed his eyes had gone on unabated for over seventy years. Those dreams had been with him since he left Germany as a boy, and shed the cynical nickname Corporal Jewboy.
Swan took three or four one-hour naps daily to compensate and, over time, he’d made the necessary physical adjustments. After all, he was not like other men, was he?
Sexually, Swan considered himself to be still at his peak, and he held with the Chinese in their literature on men’s sexuality in one important respect: Restricting one’s ejaculation to one incident per week had great wisdom. The Chinese believed that a man’s essence was contained in his reproductive fluid. His semen was the epicenter of his power. To disseminate that power carelessly and too frequently was, both Swan and the Chinese believed, to squander it.
All his life Swan had prided himself on his penis. Its length was eight inches by nearly four inches in circumference. For the last two years, he had confined his once-weekly orgasms to Friday afternoons, when his current attendee, pretty Catelena, a slender, twenty-year-old wetback girl from Jalisco who possessed unusually large brown nipples, willingly performed deep-throat fellatio on him.
Catelena would come to him half an hour after he’d punched in her cell number. She would enter his large and elegantly appointed library, which contained three thousand books and was known to be the largest collection of first editions west of Chicago. Swan delighted in having his cock sucked here. He would let his eyes scan the shelves while Catelena serviced him. He felt he was sharing her with the masters.
His remarkable collection had been purchased from the Estelle Doheny estate. On his shelves were Kapital, edited by Friedrich Engels, the Aeneid by Virgil, translated by Gavin Douglas, the original Ulysses by James Joyce, published by Shakespeare & Company in 1922, The Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald, first state, in the rare dust jacket, and The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money—Keynes, John Maynard, London. Also in the rare dust jacket and inscribed by the author.
From time to time, while Catalena’s head pulsated in an up and down motion, he would even read to her.
On Fridays, his day to cum, he would not permit her to use her hands at all. He would grasp her by the back of her neck and force his piston down her throat again and again until the moment of completion presented itself. His eruption never entered the girl’s mouth but rather traveled directly down her throat.
Catalena was a decidedly friendly girl who spoke no English, and Swan made sure that she received three thousand dollars in cash every week in a sealed white envelope. He also made it his business that her mother and father were provided for nicely. The patron of Grey Fox Estate prided himself on family values.
At the end of his Friday sessions with Catalena, she would always look into his eyes and smile, then whisper, “Mucho gusto, señor.”
Swan’s daughter, Sydnye, had, for the five years prior, been the only one to supply him oral sex regularly. Sydnye had quite simply become a master at it. Then the girl, for her own reasons in her middle teens, had declared that she was a lesbian and her sexual encounters with her father had been terminated. A period of great turmoil between the two of them had commenced and Karl Swan now considered his daughter and the status of their relationship to be an irredeemable mess. He had made her wealthy and tried his best to stay out of her life, but the fact remained that his only offspring had become a psychiatric disaster. She consumed psychotropic drugs by the handful and carried with her any number of diagnoses that had necessitated her confinement for extended periods. The kid was, in the words of the street hoodlums in Los Angeles, a total whack job.
One of Swan’s favorite pastimes for the last twenty-five years, when he was not experimenting in his work room or abroad working on a film, was adding to his estate on Grey Fox. The grounds now contained seven buildings. He had participated in the design of each structure and worked closely with the architects and engineers. Of particular interest to him were the apartments that had been specifically constructed for his newly recruited staff. The main building contained eight units. The day when fresh arrivals came north from Mexico, they would enter and occupy their attractively designed and furnished new quarters, and the estate would
host a celebration. Swan always made sure to be there. He had been fluent in Spanish for years and he liked to wear his sombrero on those fiesta occasions.
Plump little Raoul, his estate manager, had been his right-hand man for almost three decades. It was with Raoul that Swan placed his requests for new people as the human requirements arose. Through a network of associates, in three major regions of central and lower Mexico, Raoul would recruit their new residents. These persons would be made offers of an eventual path to American citizenship, given a two-thousand-dollar cash bonus, and told to maintain complete confidentiality regarding any and all negotiations. On their initial meeting with Raoul they would be assured that if they did well at their first assignment in America, they would be taught a trade and then move on to another wealthy client in the United States. This, of course, was untrue.
All new arrivals were assigned kitchen duties, gardening, horse tending, and appropriate menial tasks around the grounds. None of them would leave the property alive. Swan exerted complete control at his estate and all those who were in his employ were bound by a strict code of silence, and paid handsomely. All infractions were dealt with quickly and firmly.
Of standing importance to Karl Swan and Raoul was that no new helper would be over thirty-five years old and that the females and males should be of equal populations.
The patron of Grey Fox liked to spend a good deal of his time in the basement of the apartment quarters, in the private video-monitoring room.
Each of the eight dwellings in the building had concealed cameras in all its rooms and in the closets, and the images and accompanying sound feed these generated amused Swan and had become his personal reality-TV show.
Over the last dozen years, what the owner of Grey Fox Estates was primarily looking for in the hours he spent alone in the basement in front of his video screens, were budding romantic involvements among his new residents. Swan had developed an interest in observing sexual interactions—mating rituals. These fresh unions would have a significant impact on his later activities in his hobby room, under the stables. Two-person deaths had begun to enhance his personal enjoyment immeasurably.
Having one lover, restrained on his wall unit, watch the other undergo increasing pain only feet away on the center table, made for highly captivating drama. The surprises that materialized were invariably fascinating.
Swan had personally overseen the installation of five video cameras in his hobby room. Naturally, only state-of-the-art equipment was used. By virtue of his position in Hollywood and his ongoing fascination with the mediums of film and video, Swan had dedicated himself to learning to become an accomplished editor. He derived pleasure from meticulously crafting each one-hour segment into a theatrical quality event. After years of primarily single-unit extinction, relationship deaths had given Swan, to borrow a phrase, new life.
When both subjects entered the hobby room and were confined to their assigned apparatus (both of course had secure restraints), the proximity of the standing-position table to the horizontal platform offered a profusion of possibilities.
Watching the reaction of subject no. two (the standing person, and almost always the female) after, for instance, an eye removal or a limb excision from their loved one at only inches beyond arms length, could be exhilarating.
Swan would typically begin his questioning of the naked participants in a casual vein. An opening like, “How long have you two known each other?” might be standard to the female on the upright table. Then he would comment on their evolving romance and produce his handheld camera to play back one of their more exciting sexual encounters.
On the other hand, if on that day Swan felt more like getting right down to business, he might simply begin with: “I’ve been watching you two have sex through a hidden camera in your room. I’ve enjoyed what I’ve seen. I’ve been thinking of fucking you in the ass before I kill you.”
Swan might then explain the first of the session’s procedures to the female. “I’m going to start now on your boyfriend. While you watch I’ll insert these two twelve-inch needles into the shaft of his penis.”
If, for whatever reason, that didn’t produce the expected reaction, he might add: “But, you have a choice, my dear. I could use them on your breasts instead.”
The second deaths in these dual sessions were what Swan found to be the most intriguing. His observer on the upright table, after watching half an hour of torture on her boyfriend, might be enticed into almost any act of degradation in order to spare herself from a fate similar to the one she was seeing. Acts like consuming blood mixed with fecal matter after the removal of a foot or hand, or the ingesting of a newly excised organ, were common in the hobby room. Nothing, no demand that Swan made, seemed too excessive to be gratified. The final result on film, after careful editing, was, to say the least, captivating.
On only one occasion had the female subject offered to be the first to die instead of her boyfriend. The girl’s name was Felicia, a chubby child in her midteens.
Swan had just begun with a routine excision of all the toes on her boyfriend, Carlos’s, left foot. He then decided to offer Felicia a compromise: if she ate two of these, with cream cheese, he would be more merciful when it came to her turn. Instead of his usual bilateral breast removal, he would simply drain her blood during the anal penetration procedure.
“Kill me now,” the girl had screamed in her native tongue. “I cannot watch the death of the man I love.”
Her tormentor was moved by this articulation of selflessness. Impressed, even. He set down his clippers, put a canvas bag over the girl’s head, placed the muzzle of his .22 automatic between her eyes, then fired twice.
It was then that Swan did something he had never done before. He phoned the estate nurse and ordered her to come to the hobby room. When she arrived, Swan instructed the woman to take the boy to the infirmary and suture and bandage his wounds. Four weeks later the young man was flown to Honduras, then released on the streets with five thousand dollars in cash, a free man.
TWENTY-SIX
Half an hour after leaving Vikki’s I parked on the street across the expanse of four-lane Ocean Avenue, opposite the Sorrento Towers, where Sydnye-Laighne lived. The luxury building, overlooking the ocean, was set back off the street. It was twelve stories tall with a circular driveway. Its front entrance was in my full view fifty yards away.
Just to be safe, keeping loose ends in mind, I used the Phillips screwdriver attachment to my fold-up knife to remove the license plates from a Buick convertible parked four cars away on the street. I then replaced Mom’s plates with the Buick’s and stowed her Escalade’s plates under the mat in the cargo area.
My single motivation was to get to Sydnye, to find her and to kill her. If she wasn’t there, I’d wait until she was, then do what I had come to do. Karl Swan was target B.
I locked Mom’s car, then slipped on a pair of tinted glasses before crossing the street toward the glitzy glass façade. Entering the driveway I saw a large yellow lettered banner in the garden area centering the drive. It read: SHORT AND LONG-TERM LEASES. INQUIRE ON PREMISES WITH RENTAL AGENT. It was an invitation. That sign was my way in.
Beyond the revolving door I saw a doorman in full uniform and cap sitting behind a long, wide desk. In back of his chair was a bank of monitors that flashed every few seconds, changing images. The guy’s brass nametag read “Joe.”
Pulling out my New York City detective’s badge, I set it in front of the guy. “Joe, I’m Paul Foley, New York City Homicide. I need your help.”
He picked up the badge and looked at it, then the ID that came with it, then handed them back to me. Then he leaned over for a last look at his laptop screen on the center of his desk. “Okay, Detective, I’m all ears. What can I do for you?”
“We’ve got a trial witness about to testify here in L.A. in Santa Monica Superior Court. I need safekeeping for him for a week, ten d
ays max. I saw the short-term rent sign in front. Does the management here also rent by the day?”
Joe rolled his eyes. He sighed, took off his hat, then ran his hands through his hair. “Sure, that’s possible. But I’m not the one you should be talking to. That’d be Adelaide. I know we have a few furnished units. But like I said, you’d have to talk in person to the rental agent. She gets in at ten in the morning.”
Opening my notepad (with the bullet hole in it) to appear more coplike, I wrote down the name, “Adelaide,” then the words “Sorrento Towers.”
“Okay,” I said, “that’s helpful. Can I have Adelaide’s number or her card?”
Joe looked down at his desktop. There were several plastic holders containing business cards. He found the right one, then handed it to me. “Call her in the morning, okay? And have a good night, Detective.”
“Police business, Joe. Look, if it’s not too much trouble, I’d like you to show me a floor plan of the building.”
Joe immediately took on his best oh-Jesus-leave-me-alone-for-chrissakes face. “Look, Detective, you’re going to have to talk to the rental agent.”
“I’ve done this before, Joe. I do it all the time. The building floor plan is usually right here at the front desk. Help me out, okay, it’s been a long day. A man’s life is on the line, here.”
Joe grimaced, then opened a drawer. It’d been just as I guessed. He removed a large laminated drawing that diagrammed the building’s interior and all its apartments. He handed it across to me. “Whataya know?” he said in fake amazement, “it was right here.”
Before looking at the floor plan, my eye caught a side view of his computer screen. It showed a poker table. Apparently, Joe was an Internet gambler. Texas hold ’em.
