The Killing Lessons

by Saul Black

  Well? Can you?

  Nell was drinking the soup. Angelo bit back the encouragements: That’s right, honey, good girl. Such encouragements were unaffordable: any one of them might bring her out of the animal trance, might remind her what she was doing, eating, even though her mother and Josh, even though… No. He must be quiet. He must let her body mesmerise her mind with its need. If he interrupted her now she might never eat again.

  But after only a few sips, she stopped. Turned her head and stared out of the window. Tears welled and fell.

  ‘Hey,’ he said, resisting the urge to go to her. ‘What’s wrong?’

  She didn’t answer. His powerlessness to alleviate her suffering brought the worst of the time with Sylvia back. The otherness of the other person. The privacy of her pain. The number of times he’d asked the universe to take the tumour from her and give it to him instead. I’ll accept any deal you like, he’d said, inwardly. Just take it away from her. Just let her be all right again.

  I know, Sylvia’s spirit sent him. It made leaving bearable, knowing I’d had that kind of love in my life. Knowing I’d had the best thing.

  Nell’s tears stopped as suddenly as they’d started.

  ‘No one’s going to come,’ she said.

  FORTY-FIVE

  Valerie had been at her desk a couple of hours when Nick Blaskovitch walked up just after nine thirty a.m. and handed her a Manila envelope. She hadn’t spoken to him since the parking garage. Since I’ll come by later. Since the sudden bloom of mad hope. (Followed by its not-so-sudden withering.) The shower, the shampoo, the skirt. He’d called her ‘Skirt’ from the start. A satire on police chauvinism. And because it was him, because she knew it meant the opposite of what it would have meant coming from a sexist prick, she’d liked it. She’d only ever worn skirts for him. To feel the pleasure of his hand sliding up inside. The enjoyable shamelessness of it bunched up around her waist, her panties halfway down her legs, him inside her.

  ‘Not your handwriting, unless you disguised it,’ he said.

  Valerie looked at the envelope. It was addressed to NICHOLAS BLASKOVITCH.

  Not her handwriting.

  ‘What is this?’ she said. He wasn’t looking at her. He was averted. Palpably angry. And sad.

  ‘Just let me know when you’re ready to talk about it.’

  ‘Nick?’

  But he’d turned and walked away.

  She opened the envelope.

  The Bryte Clinic.

  Oh, God.

  For a few moments, after she’d read the appointment form, Valerie just sat still. Then she slid the single sheet back into the envelope, folded it and put it in her purse.

  How?

  It didn’t matter how. Only that. Only that he knew the truth. Or rather half the truth.

  Her intention, when she got to her feet, was to go straight to Blasko’s lab. But her phone rang, en route. It was Liza.

  ‘Tyre dry-cast is a match,’ Liza said. ‘Looks like it’s your guys.’

  ‘Fuck.’

  ‘Yeah, I know.’

  ‘DNA from the sequins?’

  ‘Couple of hours.’

  ‘Call me as soon as you have it.’

  ‘I will. You OK? You sound weird.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ Valerie said. ‘Just call me as soon as it’s confirmed.’

  Blasko was alone in a room filled with baffling equipment, working on a desktop. Valerie saw him kill the screen when she entered. A back room of her mind thought it knew why.

  ‘It’s not what you think,’ she said.

  ‘You weren’t pregnant?’

  ‘Yes, I was pregnant. But I didn’t have an abortion.’

  He shook his head. As in, what’s the point of lying now?

  ‘I had a miscarriage.’

  Which checked him. Yanked the anger choke chain. It hurt her heart that she could see him thinking, immediately, of her pain. Of what that would have been like for her. Never mind what it was like for him. It pierced her that his reflex was still there, to care for her more than for himself.

  ‘I made an appointment with the clinic,’ she said, the nakedness of the words shocking to her. ‘To buy myself time. I didn’t know what to do.’

  His shoulders – his whole body – relaxed a few degrees. Into sadness.

  ‘But I lost it anyway,’ she said, bowing her head. ‘A week before I was supposed to go.’

  They were silent for a moment. Then he said, very quietly: ‘Was it mine?’

  Options shuffled in her head. Her abdomen ached. She remembered the young doctor’s tired face, her outstretched latexed hand. What it held. The fetus curled like a question mark. There was only the truth to offer him.

  ‘I don’t know. I’m sorry.’

  Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. The word was their disease. Along with ‘love’.

  The lab was windowless, fluorescent-lit. In a corner, a piece of equipment the size of a washing machine emitted a soft sound.

  Valerie sat on the edge of his desk. She didn’t trust her legs to hold her up. Her face was heavy with heat. She kept her hands pressed in her lap.

  ‘I did everything wrong,’ she said. ‘Don’t think I don’t know that.’

  She was aware of him trying to make room in himself for all of it. Because that was how much he loved her.

  Eventually he said, ‘Someone put the appointment letter here for me to find.’

  Aside from the horror and intensity and exhaustion, this fact had been quietly working at both of them. Cops.

  ‘I realise that,’ she said.

  ‘Someone here got it in for you?’

  ‘Looks that way.’

  ‘How’d they get access?’

  I just want to be as useful as I can be, Carla had said. The FBI could get access. If they put their minds to it. Allowing full paranoia in, Valerie pictured Carla going through her garbage and counting the empties, watching her via hidden cameras in her apartment, clocking her near-miss on the 280, compiling a get-her-off-the-case file.

  Then she remembered the envelopes on the passenger seat of the Cherokee. Manila envelopes.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Valerie said, not quite knowing why she didn’t mention York. ‘I really don’t.’

  ‘Well, it’s not a small thing,’ Blasko said. ‘We need to find out.’

  We. Collusion. Had there ever been a time since they’d met when she’d stopped thinking of them as allies? We. Us. You and me. Thinking of a future without him was like thinking of never being warm enough for the rest of her life, the big world a place of edged draughts and icy currents, the daily building fatigue of restless cold. Which wouldn’t kill you, but which wear you down. Which would leech the joy. Which would leave you empty and functional. Since she’d lost him that was how Valerie had imagined herself growing old. Empty and functional. A dead-hearted, stunted woman you could count on.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I’ll find out.’

  ‘You should have told me.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Why didn’t you?’

  ‘Because I didn’t want to drag you back in. What if it hadn’t been yours?’

  ‘Would you have gone ahead and got rid of it if it had been?’

  Well? Would she? She’d barely admitted to herself making the appointment. Just as she’d barely admitted to herself what would be involved in determining paternity. Could they even test for that while the child was a tiny thing inside her? Wouldn’t she have had to have it, first? There were so many questions she’d just shoved to the back of her mind, telling herself: You don’t have to decide anything right now. You have time. You’ve bought yourself some time.

  ‘I had no right to ask you to come back,’ she said.

  ‘I had a right to know if I had a kid.’

  ‘I know. I know.’

  The machine in the corner exhaled its soft sound. Valerie thought it would be claustrophobic to work in here, no windows. At least from her desk there was a view, uninspiring rooftops, but an o
ccasionally cheering slab of San Francisco sky.

  ‘Was it a boy or a girl?’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know. I didn’t want to know.’

  His effort to accommodate all this was almost audible. It was as if she could hear his mind or soul trying to expand, to grow around it. And in his own weak person, if he can, Must suffer dully all the wrongs of Man. All the wrongs. This wrong. Her wrong. Was there any situation in her life this fucking poem didn’t apply to?

  ‘Did you want me to come see you last night?’ he said.

  Every ounce of her decency gathered and told her to lie.

  But the one indecent weakness was stronger.

  ‘You know I did,’ she said. Then, after a pause: ‘But I understand now why you didn’t.’

  She wanted to touch him. Bypass the razor wire of words. Instead, she reached for the desktop’s mouse.

  ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Don’t.’

  She ignored him. The screen saver’s vortex of coloured dots disappeared and was replaced by rows of thumbnail photos. Their content half evident, even at reduced size.

  ‘You don’t want to see those,’ he said.

  She didn’t know why she did. Except that she wanted so badly to put her arms around him that if she didn’t distract herself that was exactly what she’d do. And even the indecent weakness knew that wouldn’t be fair to him. She clicked on a thumbnail at random.

  She’d prepared herself, she thought. But she wasn’t prepared. She’d been expecting pornography, the gross disproportions of paedophilia. What she saw was a child’s scarred torso, latticed with cuts, some healed into silver threads, some rawer, infected. The child was too young for Valerie to tell whether it was a boy or a girl. She felt Blasko’s body go slack with defeat.

  ‘Christ,’ she said, though the word felt dead in her mouth.

  She clicked on another image. And another, and another.

  They were all children, all maimed by abuse. By torture, since there was no more honest a word for it. Backs, chests, legs, arms, genitals. Systematic mutilation. Mutilation with thinking behind it. It was wearying, that she could see the delight doing this would have given the people who’d done it.

  ‘These are… This is…’

  ‘Yeah,’ Blasko said. ‘It’s an emerging market. You want the icing on the cake? Some of this stuff is coming out of CPS.’

  Child Protection Services. The work goes into you. The work sows its seeds.

  ‘We’ve got fifteen different agencies under investigation,’ he said. ‘America’s not going to want to swallow this. Not that it’s peculiar to America.’

  Valerie couldn’t stop. There was an appalling rhythm of disbelief and recognition. It was always the same, whatever the horror. You thought: Surely we couldn’t be doing this? Then immediately felt nauseous déjà vu: Of course we were doing this. We’d always been doing this. This was just another of the things we did. The human story was the story of the things we did. And this, like it or not, was one of them. Along with poetry and the Sistine Chapel and jokes and forgiveness and compassion and love. Among the Just, Be just, among the Filthy, filthy too…

  ‘Do you need to see all of them?’ Blasko asked, quietly. Valerie knew he’d understood the question her actions were asking: What room will any of this leave for us? What room will it leave for love?

  ‘Please stop,’ Blasko said, putting his hand over hers.

  Valerie looked away from the screen. Could they remain uninfected by this? It was just their particular version of the standard cop question: Can you see what you have to see every day and yet live whole, with tenderness and humour and hope?

  With the last of her perverseness or selflessness or sheer confusion she turned back to the screen and clicked on one more image, his hand still lightly on hers.

  It wasn’t the worst she’d seen, but it was the most bizarre. A child’s bare back covered in cuts and burns – dozens, scores, more than a hundred – that at first glance looked random. That still looked random, even after she’d noticed what looked like a letter ‘A’ on the left shoulder, formed of cigarette burns. A fluke, an accidental initial.

  Then she looked more closely.

  There was an ‘F’ just above the sacrum. A ‘B’ halfway down the spine. A deep, barely healed ‘R’ below the right scapula. Letters. Whoever had done this had carved or scorched or slashed or gouged the alphabet into this young flesh. Sometimes the same letter appeared more than once.

  ‘Hey,’ Blasko said. ‘Come on. Stop. Enough.’

  He lifted her hand from the mouse. Clicked. Killed the screen. They sat, not looking at each other. Sadness and damage and loss. Yes. But in spite of all of it the sweet, flickering insistence of the connection between them.

  ‘I’ll say this one last time,’ she said. ‘Because if I keep saying it it’ll start to poison both of us: I’m sorry.’

  He reached out and put his hand on her knee. The weight and warmth of it there. How starved of intimacy she’d been. How starved of affection. Three years of telling herself that part of her life was over. Three years of not believing what she told herself. Three years (it was obvious to her now) of waiting for their story to start again.

  ‘OK,’ Blasko said. ‘There’s no—’

  But the door opened and a technician entered, talking on his cell phone. Blasko dropped his hand, not quite in time. Valerie stood up straight. She and Blasko exchanged a look. Later? Yes, later.

  Halfway back to her office Valerie ran into Carla York in the corridor.

  ‘Oh, hey,’ Carla said. ‘There you are. Listen, I don’t want to—’

  Valerie went to move past her. Carla blocked her.

  ‘Valerie, Jesus. I’m talking to—’

  Valerie pushed her aside. ‘Stay the fuck out of my way,’ she said.

  ‘What the hell is wrong with you?’ Carla said.

  ‘You think I don’t know what’s going on?’ Valerie said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You think I don’t know what you’re doing here?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Listen to me,’ Valerie said. ‘You’re not going to—’

  Valerie froze.

  Carla was looking at her as if she didn’t know what she was talking about. Or rather Carla was trying to look at her as if she didn’t know what she was talking about. And not quite succeeding.

  But all of that had become, in an instant, secondary to Valerie.

  Oh my God. Holy fuck.

  ‘Look,’ Carla began, ‘I don’t know what you think is— Hey! Valerie?’

  Valerie had turned and was hurrying down the corridor.

  A blurred half-minute later she was back at Blasko’s office. The technician had finished his call and was now at his desk, spectacles on, lit by the computer screen’s light. Blasko was over by the quiet machine in the corner. He turned when she entered.

  ‘Get the last image I was looking at back up,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  Valerie was at his desk, reaching for the mouse. ‘The pictures I was just looking at. The last one. Jesus…’ She’d clicked the screen open, but it was now on a page of online dialogue exchanges. One of which said: Vanilla, of course! What’s yours?

  ‘The pictures, Nick. Fuck.’

  ‘Hold on, hold on,’ Blasko said. ‘Let me… Wait.’

  He closed the page and returned to the desktop. Answered the security prompt with a password Valerie didn’t catch. Opened a folder. The thumbnails reappeared.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  Valerie grabbed the mouse and began opening and closing the images, searching.

  ‘Wait,’ Blasko said. ‘Here. This one.’

  The image of the kid’s body reopened. Valerie scrutinised it. Blasko didn’t ask. Didn’t need to. He knew the shift in her aura. What it meant. His own went the same way, when the work took over. The work took over and everything else – everything else – dropped away. It excited him to feel it in her aga
in. It was the other big force that bound them, the disease they’d signed up for, years ago.

  ‘Where’s enlarge?’ Valerie said. The software was unfamiliar. The dropdowns didn’t mean anything.

  ‘Here. Double size?’

  ‘Do it.’

  The image expanded.

  Valerie stared.

  Felt all the exhaustion burned away in a second.

  The child’s body with the tortured flesh. The brutally carved letters. The scars. A… R… Q…

  But it wasn’t the written-on body she needed to decode. It was the environment in which the body had been photographed. It was the background.

  A child’s room. The corner of an unmade bed. A window looking down onto a lawn with an out of focus solitary tree. A wall with the corner of an alphabet chart, each letter illustrated with a brightly coloured image.

  A is for APPLE

  B is for BALLOON

  C is for CLOCK

  D is for DINOSAUR

  E is for ELEPHANT

  F is for FORK

  G is for GOOSE

  H is for HAMMER

  *

  All her sane instincts said: Calm down. Wait. Let it settle. Hundreds of thousands of homes and kindergartens probably have the exact same chart.

  ‘Reduce it again,’ she said. ‘Get the window view in focus.’

  Blasko moved the mouse again. Clicked. The image returned to its original size.

  Valerie bent closer to the screen.

  But she didn’t need to. She already knew.

  The tree on the lawn outside had a double trunk. An inverted Y.

  The tree in front of which Katrina Mulvaney, a little more than half her short lifetime ago, had been photographed.