by Ann Benson
So just to be careful, I did what Vuska wanted and dragged in a few more of the local known perverts. I still couldn’t shake the sense that it was a lot of wheel-spinning. Most of the guys in our area were molesters, anyway, not abductors or murderers. Not that molestation is an insignificant crime. But killing is a big, big step. The men I interviewed were icky and deviant, but not evil. Most of them were embarrassed and ashamed to be hauled in for that kind of questioning again. One guy pleaded with me to get everyone to leave him alone, said he’d been through this kind of thing seven or eight times before. I did feel kind of bad for him, for a few seconds. Then my sanity returned.
I was looking for a sociopath, someone incapable of genuine shame, and the local perverts that I interviewed were all ashamed to death, which took most of them out of my running. My guy probably wasn’t a magician, but he morphed himself into someone each of his victims trusted, well enough to get the victim into a car without making a scene. The depth of his illusion-making had to be incredible, nearly flawless. He had to be connected to them; he couldn’t pull this off without having a lot of firsthand observation. And the amount of research this perp was doing had to have been phenomenal, his preparation impeccable. Where would he find the time to do it so thoroughly? I couldn’t figure out how someone could work at a job, have a life, and manage to devote so much time to this activity.
Unless the work and this activity had something to do with each other. Unless the work was his life.
There is a small group of young, hip undercover cops in Los Angeles whose job it is to stay in close contact with the street kids. They get hauled directly out of the academy to mingle with the little lost souls of the City of Angels at some of the more infamous street corners. The first uniform they wear is attitude. They run informants and gather information on the various drug scenes, with the vague and dismally unrealistic hope of trying to keep a street kid from pumping himself full of the bad drugs that inevitably come into town. They’re tough to pin down, but Vuska got word to one of their sergeants and managed to arrange for me to get a call.
The young cop I talked to told me right away that what I wanted was a tall order and it might be a while before he got back to me. It surprised the hell out of me when he called me a few days later to say that four, maybe five, kids had abandoned their usual haunts without any advance word. Kids came and went in that scene all the time, he explained, but often if a kid were going to split, he’d generally talk about it first. These boys had all just stopped showing up very abruptly, all within the last year.
Estimates of the disappearance dates were predictably loose. The time when we had that big thunderstorm was one of the offerings; around the holidays, maybe Thanksgiving or Christmas was another. It made me really sad to think that a child of roughly the same age as my own son could pass into nothingness without more notice than that.
My perp had been cruising. Maybe someone saw something, I said to the young cop. Maybe one of the other kids—
Don’t hold your breath, he replied.
It was all so demoralizing. Everywhere I turned, I found discouragement. Only Errol Erkinnen seemed to be investing himself in these disappearances, and he couldn’t pull cops off the ever-increasing post– September 11 security details to go out and canvass neighborhoods where the grabs had been made, talk to friends of the missing boys, all the grunt work we do. In our daily interactions, Escobar and Frazee were oozing encouragement, but their caseloads and schedules were nearly debilitating. I didn’t have the heart to take either of them up on their gracious offers of help. If my life were a movie, there would be some astonishing break, an unexpected bit of evidence, or maybe a glaring slip-up on the part of the abductor. It would take 120 minutes to solve the crimes, because that’s about the time limit for audiences, who are notoriously fidgety after that amount of time. It was becoming plain to me that my best shot at finding the door to this new Bluebeard’s world was to understand how he selected his victims. I made one of my famous charts, spent a lot of time sorting through ethnicity, socioeconomic status, health, all the highly visible qualities. Two of the kids had the same pediatrician, but so what? They lived in the same general area. Three of the families were vegetarian. Again, it was interesting and noticeable, but it meant nothing more than the possibility that the mothers might have shopped in a couple of the same markets or that they owned the same cookbooks. I was looking for a swap meet kind of connection. Were they all at the same flea market one day, and had he written down all the license plates?
Had they all gone to the La Brea Tar Pits on a day when he happened to be there?
I would have to reinterview all the families again, with a new focus. What a nasty job that would be—some of these families had lost their kids a long time ago and maybe, just maybe, their wounds were finally starting to heal.
But I was pleasantly surprised. Mrs. McKenzie was really the only one who gave me any trouble. The widow of the suicide was quiet but extremely cooperative. Most of the rest were eager to help and participated fully.
At first I thought it was a lucky coincidence that all of the families were still in the area, until I realized that while there was still hope a child might return, very few parents would move away from the homestead. Talk about having your life on hold; only two of the families had rearranged the missing child’s bedroom to any serious extent. I went through all of the bedrooms again. I found myself traveling through a dizzying assortment of wall treatments, each reflecting what the decorating parent hoped and dreamed for the kid. The plaid wallpaper in one of the rooms had me a little concerned. This kid spent all his private time surrounded by infinite perpendicular lines in red and green, and that would be the last thing he saw when he went to sleep at night. What would he dream about?
There was one room where one wall was a floor-to-ceiling chalkboard, at the base of which was a tray of brightly colored chalks. The kid’s last artistic opus was still there, untouched—a toothy monster that rose up the full height of the board and breathed some kind of beam out of its nose like an electronic dragon. It caught my attention because it bore a more than passing resemblance to the poster of the dark knight. The shaft of directed light was fiery red-orange and was aimed at some little beady-eyed bad guy who’d been relegated to the bottom two feet of the board. This diminutive ne’er-do-well was about to melt, if I understood the artist’s intent correctly. Despite the goriness of the subject matter, it lifted my spirits to think of this kid standing there with all these colors in a bucket and his own permission to go wild on a blackboard. What a treat, even for an adult.
One boy’s room, airbrushed blue with white clouds, reminded me of the little boy’s room in the movie Kramer vs. Kramer. There was a stunning silence about that room, a sense of conflict, as if all were not well within the family when the abduction had taken place and the sense of having caused it had oozed out of the parents into the son’s personal space. No Tar Pits souvenirs, though, which was a momentary disappointment. Maybe I was wrong about that connection.
Of all these missing children, only one had shared a room. I didn’t spend a lot of time there; there didn’t seem to be much of a point. The brother who still inhabited the room was older than his missing sib—seventeen, a miserable age at best. And he was a miserable kid with a slit-eyed look on his face that screamed go away. He answered my questions about his brother with clipped brevity. I thanked him for his help and I started out of the room, but just as I was crossing the threshold, he spoke again.
“Do you want to look at the box of his stuff?”
Stuff was what I craved. “Yes, if you don’t mind letting me see it.”
“You better ask my mom, though.”
It turned out to be good advice. The mother became quite agitated, but in the end she allowed me to take it, with the understanding that I would inventory the contents and bring everything back when I was done examining it.
I experienced a sad letdown as I left that last house, box in hand. My
next order of business would be to create another masterpiece, another perfectly organized layout of everything I knew about my victims and their personal habits, including each one’s Tar Pits factor. What sign would they put on my desk when I got through with this one? MUSEUM ENTRANCE, maybe.
Ordinarily, this kind of task excited me, made me feel like I was on the verge of some wondrous revelation. Okay, so some of them had been to the Tar Pits Museum, but it didn’t necessarily mean anything. There were other obvious commonalities: a shared disdain for clothes hangers, and a tendency to have more video games than books. Mismatched socks, candy wrappers, stained Popsicle sticks.
I got back to my desk, set the box down behind my chair. There were a dozen messages on my voice mail, one or two from lawyers, who I just bet had magicians and illusionists for clients. The thought of calling any of them back made me nearly nauseated. I chose instead to concentrate on the maddening question that torments every mother as Christmas approaches, in the hope that it would clarify a few things on this case.
What do adolescent boys like?
In total frustration, I rolled my chair away from my desk. I ran into the box and got jolted backward.
It would be just another dead end, so why bother? There wasn’t going to be anything earth-shattering in there.
I opened it, Pandora again. Sneakers, baseball glove, a stack of comic books tethered by elastic bands. A tube of bright blue zinc oxide nose protector that was shoved into a baseball cap of the same color. Superhero cards in a plastic box. Three posters rolled up, one of a rock star, one of a famous wrestler—
The answer to the Christmas question came crashing through the haze: Adolescent boys like beasts. Monsters, gremlins, satyrs, gargoyles, centaurs, basilisks, chimeras, dragons, cyclopes, serpents, and werewolves—these were a few of their favorite things. The last poster I unrolled was the same one I’d seen before: the same beast, carrying the dark knight from the La Brea Tar Pits. The knight still had no face.
But I knew, I just knew, that he was the monster I was looking for.
fifteen
Chere Maman,
June has begun gloriously, with blue skies, warm winds, and the air thick with the scent of jasmine. We are glad for its abundance this year, for there is a sister in one of the adjacent convents who can extract the scent from a potful of the blossoms as if she were a conjurer, a useful and welcome heresy if such can be said to exist. She uses it as a base on which to build more-complex fragrances, all of which enhance worship by inducing a state of calm and peace in the worshiper.
Three days ago his Holiness turned an ankle, which is said to have become quite blue and yellow in the aftermath of the injury, but he was otherwise unharmed. Of course it cannot be left at that; the cardinal who was with him at the time says that he simply collapsed, but a bishop who was also present says that he appeared to have caught the hem of his robe on the tip of one of his slippers. Now we have an intrigue between a cardinal and a bishop within the Pope’s immediate circle; it does not require much imagination to know who will triumph in that test of might! Whisperings about the state of his Holiness’s health are due to begin by sunset.
I hope these bits of news will help to take your mind off the terrible events by which you are now surrounded. None of our paltry intrigues can approach your fare in Brittany. Take heart, dear Mother, and be strong as always; God will do as He will do, and we must accept His will as part of a plan, the wisdom of which we may never understand but of which we may be assured.
What wisdom? There was none that I could see in the unfolding of these events.
The jasmine of which Jean spoke so fondly had yet to even bud in the north, but that was no bother to me, for I always found its scent cloying, especially in perfumes; better the stink of the body, in which there is admirable honesty. The Brittany sunlight is always thinner than that with which the fair south is blessed; the air is cooler and the scents more muted. If we take comfort in any success here, it is that of our orchards under Frère Demien’s masterful husbandry. The remnants of pear blossoms had fallen to the ground on Brittany breezes like so much ill-timed snow, and if the summer remained fair we would have a bountiful harvest. I can almost taste the pots des fruits that will grace our board when the yield comes in.
Cher Jean,
Through your eyes and words I know the beauty of Avignon, which helps to keep my woes at bay, if only for a moment. When I travel there in the fall it will all seem so familiar to me. No doubt you will recall what June looks like here, but this year the flowers and trees seem more wondrous than ever to me, a bounty for which I am grateful, because I feel so helpless in the wake of our discoveries. I feel as if the very soul has been stolen from within me. This quest, begun by me with such good intent, now seems to have all the breath and blood and will required for self-perpetuation, regardless of my wishes. I am so deeply torn; I both crave and despise the dark knowledge that Jean de Malestroit is uncovering and, as I made him promise, has shared with me. My desire to know the fate of the lost young ones is quickly being overshadowed by my fear of coming to know who has taken them. Each day a fresh arrow is shot into my breast, and through no amount of effort can I seem to pull out the barbs, which fester within and will poison me if I do not get them out soon.
The sharpest of those heart arrows was the growing certainty that Milord Gilles was not the man I believed him to be. Once he had been the veritable brother of my own son, flawed indeed but still a part of my family. He was one of the few remaining links I had to that lost child, and now I stood to see that destroyed.
Rumors of all this are spreading like a fresh plague, Jean de Malestroit told me one morning. We must be discreet, so Milord does not get wind of all this unnecessarily. We need not upset him without due cause.
What he meant to say was that he did not wish Milord to know that he was under suspicion. My bishop needn’t have worried, as it turned out, for Milord was much preoccupied with his own affairs and could not be bothered with answering common rumors. He was far too busy fending off the considerable wrath of Duke Jean after the incident at Saint-Etienne-de-Mer-Morte.
“Fifty thousand ecus? Mon Dieu!”
The letter from Duke Jean authorizing that enormous fine lay on the table before Jean de Malestroit, whose look of satisfaction could barely be hidden.
“Almost impossible for anyone to pay,” I said. “All the King’s jewels would not cover it. Even at the height of his fortune, Lord Gilles would have struggled with that amount.”
His Eminence did not need to speak to reveal his pleasure in this new development. It adorned his face more visibly than a plume on a cat.
I moved toward the window, where the air was not so stale as that which seemed suddenly to surround me. The gray gloomy sky was no comfort. As I gazed outward, I heard Jean de Malestroit arise from his chair. He came up behind me and laid a hand upon my shoulder in what seemed to be an attempt at sympathy. “One is never truly pleased by another’s fall from grace, Guillemette, but this time even you must admit that it is well deserved.”
His comfort would have meant more to me if his glee had been less obvious. I could not reasonably argue that the fine was improper, but it gave rise to other concerns, among them the possibility of a violent reaction from Milord. “The man is a warrior,” I said. “When you strike him a blow, he will surely respond with a goodly blow of his own.”
My bishop managed to suppress a blossoming smile. “Without credit, the man is crippled, and with such a fine hanging over his head, no one will lend him a sou. We shall see how he reacts, when he has to pay the cost out of his own treasury.”
Milord reacted as if there were no cost at all. There came yet another outburst from him, perhaps the most crazed to date. In what was described by those present as a fit of rage, Milord dragged the priest Le Ferron out of the castle at Saint-Etienne in chains and took him to the dungeon of his own castle at Tiffauges. There he subjected Le Ferron to torture and humiliation worse than he had
perpetrated on his direst enemies, and word of it got back to Le Ferron’s brother, Geoffrey, who was quite predictably outraged beyond reason.
“But why Tiffauges?” I fretted aloud.
“Because it is outside Duke Jean’s authority,” Jean de Malestroit replied. “The only other place he might have brought him was Pouzages. He has lost Champtocé again.”
His hold on Tiffauges and Pouzages was artificial, since they actually belonged to his wife, who had heretofore not allowed her desperate husband to sell them. I pitied Lady Catherine—we all did. She was a ghost of a woman, a formless thing without influence, always so silent and dour. Though Gilles had sired a daughter by her as was his duty, I am certain that they both had gritted their teeth through the entire act by which little Marie was conceived. Ironically, the little girl was a sweet and precious child and the closest thing that I would ever have to a grandchild. I often wondered how she could have been the product of such discord.
For discord there was, and plenty of it. Milord never spoke a kind word to his wife nor showed her any favor at all in the time I observed them; in the best of their days together, his treatment of her could not be described as anything beyond polite. More often he showed complete disdain for her, except in her appearance—he was always careful to see to her wardrobe so she would be a proper ornament for him. Had he treated her as most noble husbands treat their acquired wives, with distant courtesy and discretion in his philanderings, we would all have admired him more. But he tried to bully her into submission in property matters where her consent was required, almost always with the help of Jean de Craon. Often we heard the shouts of coercion ringing through the chambers and halls of Champtocé, and we all feared for her.
